Giosuè Calaciura recounts the events of an extraordinary night, entrusting men and women without power or wealth with the vision of a revolutionary new world.

It is the night of the first Christmas. The announcements are precise: the child who will change everyone's fortunes is about to be born. Many are waiting for him, gathered in the thick of the countryside, in front of a stable where the Passion of the Animals has always taken place. They are the last, the poor, the marginalized, for the first time dragged into History that until then had only recorded the lives of the powerful. And many fear it: the birth of the child promises to break the chains of privilege and ridicule the arrogance of the rich.
As in the avant-garde, one cries and laughs along with the protagonists of a nativity scene poised between the traditional and the fantastic, the desire for justice-always frustrated-and the daily ordeal of men and women. Fathers, mothers, children, shepherds, prostitutes, soldiers, the poor in spirit, animals and the Magi come alive to tell their stories with wonder. They are small, extraordinary existences suspended between redemption and defeat, the promise of the kingdom of heaven and the cruelty of all time.
Giosuè Calaciura returns to his workshop of narratives with irony and poetry, shaping a feeling of wonder that animates the joys, loves, unhappiness, and adventure of life preserved and held in the «figures» eternally traveling in our clay cribs. One Night is a novel free of all restraint, sharpened in the poignant tension between the sacredness of lives and the fury of a literary imagination that respects and blanders, celebrates and desecrates.

The Mafia as no one has ever told it before. An epic of horrors and sacrilege in the river tale of a nameless and faceless killer that flows inexorably and impetuously toward the final explosion to leave room for the astonished silence of consciences. Thirty years after the Cosa Nostra massacres that changed the face of Italy.

Malacarne was first published twenty-five years ago, and it remains, to this day, a fulminating novel. With the cold lucidity of an X-ray examination it traverses recognizable stories, familiar characters, to reveal the swollen, diseased body of our societies. The symptoms seem to have changed but the pathology is the same. Astonishing is the fluvial writing, magmatic language that takes hostage, dragging the reader into a relentless, breathless adventure where poetry and trivia, science fiction and police headquarters mattinals, comics and realism, irony and despair, delirium and truth of the human condition in the Meridione: «our prehistoric world in the heart of modernity» where life follows «the natural destiny of violent death. ». It is the visionary confession - at times prophetic - of a hitman who victim after victim, massacre after massacre, reconstructs the gruesome and prodigious epic of the nameless city, perhaps Palermo: from the century-old marginality of the working-class neighborhoods to the billionaire centrality of the international drug trade. Protagonists, the voice of a killer who knows the before and after, his mute judge and violence: the only form of communication, the exclusive representation of the world. In the spiral of wealth obtained with bullets, criminals have eighteenth-century movements and executions are decided with Christmas bingo numbers. Between alleys and markets, between squares and waterfronts, between closets of fugitives and chambers of death, executioners and victims chase each other in a macabre and surreal roundabout: a grotesque circle of hell where God cannot find the souls of those dissolved in acid. In the original afterword that enriches this edition, Giosuè Calaciura goes back with his memory to the experience that was the origin of this book and - perhaps - of his writing.

A very young wayfarer on a journey full of surprises, passions and betrayals, sweetness and violence. This is Calaciura's Jesus. Structured almost like a feuilleton or a television series, punctuated with twists and turns, innervated by a constant tension, in his new novel the author reinvents one of the greatest stories ever told.

A restless teenager flees his mother, his daily obligations, his poor and oppressive village, and sets out to find his father. He actually pursues his past, an understanding of the mystery of his birth, the riddles of his childhood, because his mother is silent, perhaps she does not remember, or perhaps she does not want to speak. Only the father could perform the miracle of restoring his memory. But the father is no longer there, he has abandoned the family.

That boy's name is Jesus, Mary and Joseph the parents, Nazareth and Galilee the space of his adventures, his need for love, the pain and shyness that always accompany him. And Calaciura's Jesus is a very young wayfarer on a journey full of surprises, passions and betrayals, sweetness and violence. Surrounding him are men and women who are children of a land with ruthless laws, fierce Roman rule with its unmatched machinery of war and government, the religious and moral authority of the priests, the arrogance and pomp of the rich, the brutality of those who stand outside society and plunder the weakest, the desperation of those who cannot even find an olive to feed themselves or a well to quench their thirst. It is a restless time, disrupted by profound changes, the new and the old, the ancient and the modern collide and crumble, no one more than a boy tormented by desire and anxiety about the future is able to sense the subterranean throb of a coming revolution. Of which, without really meaning to, he will be a protagonist.

Punctuated by twists and turns, innervated by a constant tension, Calaciura's novel embodies the rush of adventure and epic, family intrigue, the paranoia of suspicion, the tension of unsolvable mystery. Many of his themes can be found there: childhood and the difficulty of growing up, the innocence of the most fragile creatures, the moral misery of adults, the impetuosity of eros. But here they are radicalized, to the point of contaminating and reinventing one of the greatest stories ever told.

A streetcar, which makes itself imagined as an island of light in the darkness of Christmas night, travels through the far suburbs. Inside it carries a mystery, fragile and abandoned. Poor people who have finished their day get on. The prostitute deported from Africa, her hapless client, the illegal immigrant who lives by expediency, the artist overcome by illness, the nurse besieged by loneliness, the boy who cannot put together dinner for his partner and daughter. They go toward the eve night that awaits them, or that simply does not await them. Each carries with them, in their thoughts, in their memory, on their bodies, a different and complicated story, about themselves and others, but still steeped in helplessness and anger. But that mystery thrown in the back of the seats, behind the cab of the driver addicted to indifference, gathers them all together, like a traveling crib, a mirage of salvation. As much as each of them feels that there is no salvation outside that Christmas streetcar. In his strongly lyrical prose, which has the ability to modulate to the moments of the story, almost to music, Giosuè Calaciura with the tools of literature gives us back the urgency, depth and contradictions of our time. In the manner of Dickens (whose A Christmas Carol this tale openly recalls), without shying away from putting himself resolutely on the side of denunciation and commitment.

The purpose is to affirm that society has inalienable human substance and to show its tenacious desire to exist. Thus, book after book, Calaciura goes on to compose a novel of the streets that have no name.

In metropolises there are often areas that seem to concentrate in a few streets the energy, character, darkness, violence and beauty of the whole city, as if they were a condensate of life, a clumped and strong version of the flavors of every corner and square. This is the neighborhood of which Calaciura tells, a handful of narrow streets in the heart of Palermo in which every vice and virtue, heart and gut, misery and wealth is mirrored and deformed. Here live Mimmo and Cristofaro, children and fraternal friends, Carmela and her daughter Celeste, Totò the robber and the friend who will betray him, here horses are bred for races and the scales of the delicatessens are rigged, while the ferry's barks mingle with the wails caused by a drunken father's fists. On one side is the sea, with its wind that disrupts smells in dancing whirls, carrying fragrance of meat all the way into the homes of those who never eat meat. On the other is the flat expanse of the city, with its stores, wealthy ladies, law and guards. In the alleys, the smell of bread baked twice a day arouses such awe that each person marks himself with a cross, perhaps as law enforcement besieges the neighborhood and guards its entrances. But the larger city cannot stifle its guts, its heart, for there its soul has rested, there it glimpses the miracles and wonder of each day, the pride and effulgence of the ancient, of the present, the hope of the future.