Healing with Dante: a beautiful and spellbinding lesson on the therapeutic power of poetry and the saving power of the Supreme Poet's verses that calls out other great poets. An invitation to listen again to submerged voices, neglected by the arrogance of an age running at digital speed.

«When my publisher called me to ask me to give a lecture on the therapeutic power of Dante's poetry, thinking of the stage I would be on (the Basilica of Maxentius), the audience, the enormity of the topic (whether with Dante one can be cured, and what), and also what Contini called 'the shadowy world of Dantists,' the first reaction I had was a wave of fear. I tried to control it, but with difficulty. Fortunately, two other poets came to my lips, to my rescue: Brodskij and Saba. Brodsky, for a reflection that I have never forgotten since: writing is a practice that does not give experience but continuous uncertainty, and the feeling that is most frequently experienced is panic. And Saba, for a fragment that resurfaced from who knows where: 'And from every evil a beautiful verse heals me.'»

This "discourse" by Fabio Stassi ranges through Dante's works (Comedy, Rhymes, Vita Nuova, Convivio) seeking an answer to three questions: why Dante is always contemporary, why his poetry is like a therapy from Melancholy to Bliss, and how--the perennially suggestive question--he cured himself through insistent poetic self-analysis. An itinerary, ingenious and exact, into his words, endecasyllables, canticles, songs, sonnets, with a keen eye on the analyses of the many other poets (Saba, Borges, Brodskij, Leopardi, Ungaretti, Maldel'štam, T.S. Eliot...) who were convinced of the thaumaturgic power of his verse.

A novel where the melancholy of constantly leaving behind things and people, in time and space, dominates. But also the thoughtlessness of setting out to find them. Or to be found.

Vince Corso, bibliotherapist and literary puzzle detective, on the train that is supposed to take him to a date with his fiancée runs into an original traveling companion: an educated, insinuating man who physically reminds him of the great Léo Ferré, the anarchic chansonnier of Avec le temps. Only Corso has taken the wrong direction-he was supposed to go south instead of north-and contrite he would like to ripa-rare. But the man, mysteriously allusive, urges him to persist in the mistake: “perhaps you don’t know it yet, but it may be time to make this journey.” Genoa, the first destination, will give him a tug at his heartstrings: from there to Marseilles his very early childhood had been spent. His waitress mother had conceived him with a stranger one night in late July 1969. And this was to be the most important investigation of his life: to find out who his father was. For five years Vince Corso has sent him a postcard a day, leaving the recipient’s name blank and addressing them to the only place he knew his father had passed through at least for one night: the Hotel Le Negresco in Nice. Her search will take place on the shores of the Côte d’Azur, among poor boarding houses and Art Nouveau hotels, behind poets’ verses and old characters laden with lived stories, following the indecipherable mosaic of individual destinies and coincidences. Until the recognition that completes the circle: being returned from books to life, getting back the chance to “love without measure.” French Nocturne is actually a nocturne full of light. It is a story of mistakes, of dates you don’t know you have, of labyrinths and orphans searching for a harbor. A novel where the melancholy of constantly leaving behind things and people, in time and space, dominates. But also the recklessness of setting out to find them. Or to be found.

A father in search of his son. A carpenter and his puppet. A little gem of creativity and literary inspiration.

"Maestro Geppetto is a heartbreaking and beautiful novel because it reminds us that of all extinctions, that of imagination is perhaps the most inhuman and the most dangerous." - Andrea Bajani, il Venerdì - la Repubblica

What if the adventures of Geppetto, the creator of Pinocchio, were entirely different from how we know them? What if alongside the vicissitudes of the puppet who became a child there were also those of a father who wanted a son so much that he built him with his own hands? Fabio Stassi has written a new story from a classic story, that of one of the greatest novels in Italian literature. In its pages the elderly carpenter becomes a feverish man driven by the desire for fatherhood, the victim of a cruel joke by his fellow citizens. The puppet’s exploits, funny, dramatic, violent, mingle with his adventures, which are themselves surprising and at times bewildering. Geppetto the man seems to step out of Collodi’s fairy tale for young and old and move to a contemporary stage where poverty, illness, the need for love, cruelty and redemption take center stage, the concrete engine of action. Thus Geppetto becomes a portrait of an introverted and reckless man, candid and visionary, who is about to face the world and discover it anew, pursuing the dream of a creature that is flesh of his flesh, into which he can pour the emotions and affection he carries within. But that world scorns and mocks him, revealing all its ferocity in a merciless condemnation of loneliness and diversity. In Mastro Geppetto, Stassi indulges with evident pleasure in one of his great talents, that of shaping the real and imaginary matter of stories and characters to draw from them a tale rooted in desire and fantasy, producing the metamorphosis that transforms the fiction of literary art into the most luminous and moving truth, the most painful and human.

Book finalist for the Naples Prize for Fiction 2022.

A new adventure with blacker hues than ever before for bibliotherapist Vince Corso, a conundrum that leads him to stray into the shadows and question the threatening and saving power of words.

This story was born in a prison. An Albanian inmate revealed to me in a meeting the true meaning of my family’s ancient nickname, Vrascadù. I had always believed it meant Fallen Arms and was a contraction of Sicilian. Instead, it was an Arbëreshë phrase; the boy handed me the translation on a torn page that I carried with me for years: I kill who I want. That is the title of this novel, and why it begins with another note sent from Regina Coeli.

Writing to Vince Corso, who by trade treats people by suggesting books to read, is a lifer named Queequeg. Thus begins a difficult week, in which Corso will find himself a foot away from madness and in the middle of an investigation, but from inquisitor to inquisite, as if in addition to reality even the alphabet has been turned upside down and a Magic Door exists for real between books and life.

Lost to Rome, Vince Corso trains himself to get lost, not to find himself. His is the testimony of an unwitting detective who can no longer read the world around him. A report on shadows, and on the threatening and saving power of words. A long letter to his father, after many postcards.

For the publishing house’s 50th anniversary, several Sellerio authors pulled a book from the catalog off the shelf and retold it in a compelling new storyline. The result was eight extraordinary adventures.

For the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Sellerio publishing house, eight “mystery writers,” companions at different times in our history, recalled a book chosen from the more than three thousand in the catalog, the one that struck each of them for whatever personal reason (not necessarily that they liked it the most), and made it the defining element of a new plot. They wrote a story with a book: where it is from time to time either a kind of motive for a death (so in Marco Malvaldi’s story The End is Known by the mysterious author Holiday Hall); or it is the instrument for a metamorphosis in a person’s life (in Santo Piazzese’s story, Ignazio Buttitta’s poem The True Story of Salvatore Giuliano); or it is taken as the schematic model of an exchange of misunderstandings, the narrative skeleton of a risky affair (this is the case, in Francesco Recami’s short story, of Louise de Vilmorin’s little volume The Jewels of Madame de***); or the moral nourishment that gives the force of doubt necessary to those who investigate (as it is, for Gaetano Savatteri’s two “investigators Laurel and Hardy,” the skeptical apologue of Anatole France’s Prosecutor of Judea); a pure inspiration (that’s what leads Giampaolo Simi to choose Vázquez Montalbán’s Assassination at the Central Committee as a guide to his story of terrorism); the lingering atmosphere of a black underground Palermo (which is what Gian Mauro Costa wants in common with his black intrigue in a grim and romantic affair from Stories and Chronicles of the Underground City by the unforgettable poetic chronicler and theatricalist Salvo Licata); a medicine for a horrendous case of isolation (so is Gesualdo Bufalino’s La luce e il lutto for Fabio Stassi’s bibliotherapist Vince Corso); and finally, an anguish-inducing book that becomes the idea for solving the case (as happens to Carlo Monterossi, Alessandro Robecchi’s amateur who finds himself investigating threatening postcards while reading about those of Hans Fallada’s two little anti-Nazi heroes in Everyone Dies Alone).

The authors of these stories, in pulling a Sellerio book from the shelf to commemorate the publishing house’s 50th year, did not intend to devise a “story about a book,” but attempted to recreate through fiction their nevertheless most vivid reading experience with Sellerio.

«Embalming the Greeks and Romans deprived them of their strength, that is, of their conflicting modernity» (from Luciano Canfora’s Introduction).

The conflicting modernity of the classics is the theme of this book: short stories and reflections in narrative form. Alicia Giménez-Bartlett, in an ironic Apologia, portrays a teenage girl, who repeats, “I hate the classics. The changing presence, in the seasons of life, of Ulysses, the prototype of adventure, is Francesco Cataluccio’s path. Daria Galateria illustrates the virtuous avarice that prefers the classics. Fabio Stassi imagines a science fiction scenario: an invincible species of woodworm has attacked libraries. So many write without having cut their teeth on the classics, per Roberto Alajmo: it is the prevalence of the bonghista. Scott Spencer reads Crime and Punishment without neglecting TV series, to profile the future of attraction to great books.

Un anno in giallo collects 12 short stories, one for each month of the year; each author has chosen "his" month, setting there, in that time of the year, a story with "his" detective. Opening the collection with the month of January is, of course, Andrea Camilleri, the forerunner, the one who has imprinted the mystery novel with an unrepeatable mark, creating with Inspector Montalbano a character who is firmly established in the minds and hearts of his endless readers from all over the world.

Then, month after month, all the other detectives: the institutional ones like Antonio Manzini's Deputy Police Chief Schiavone, Inspector Petra Delicado with Alicia Giménez-Bartlett's Vice Fermín. The detectives by chance: the very Sicilian Saverio Lamanna and Lorenzo La Marca so similar to their authors, Gaetano Savatteri and Santo Piazzese, the bibliotherapist Vince Corso invented by Fabio Stassi, the TV author Carlo Monterossi, a character by Alessandro Robecchi, and Kati Hirschel, the bookseller from Istanbul, home of Esmahan Aykol. Finally, the choral investigators: the condominium of the railing house headed by Francesco Recami's Amedeo Consonni and Marco Malvaldi's goliardic old men of the BarLume.

Two characters make their appearance here for the first time: the lawyer Cornelia Zac, the product of Simonetta Agnello Hornby's imagination and legal profession, and the policewoman Angela Mazzola, serving in the anti-robbery section of Palermo's Police Department, the brainchild of Gian Mauro Costa. The two new detectives we become acquainted with in this anthology will soon be the protagonists of novels.

An exceptional publishing event: after a month in the company of Montalbano, a whole year with the detectives of the Sellerio house for the first time together with 12 unpublished short stories.

«The new school of the Italian giallo is Sellerio-branded. It was not born under a cabbage. It has behind it the tradition of Sciascia and Camilleri, and the infallible taste of Elvira Sellerio who knew that to give discipline to writers as maximally undisciplined as Italian writers there was no better structure than that, very solid but very elastic, of noir.»

Antonio D’Orrico, LA LETTURA – CORRIERE DELLA SERA

«Praise to the publishers who don't just look in the mail receipt but bring books to life - to the thoroughbreds of the stable of mystery writers from Camilleri to Giménez-Bartlett, via Malvaldi, Recami, Costa, Manzini...»

Luciano Genta, TTL – LA STAMPA