the winners - American Initiative for Italian Culture

Book Award “The Bridge”
Books in competition for the 2015 edition
ITALIAN FICTION
BELLA MIA, by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (Elliot 2014)
GIORNI DI SPASIMATO AMORE, by Romana Petri (Longanesi 2014)
LACCI, by Domenico Starnone (Einaudi 2014)
TOMMASO SA LE STELLE, by Giovanni Montanaro (Feltrinelli 2014)
UNA PARETE SOTTILE, by Enrico Regazzoni (Neri Pozza 2014)
ITALIAN NONFICTION
L’AMOROSO PENSIERO: Petrarca e il romanzo di Laura, by Marco Santagata (Mondadori 2014)
CARLO III, by Giuseppe Caridi (Salerno Editrice 2014)
I COGNOMI DEGLI ITALIANI. Una storia lunga 1000 anni, by Roberto Bizzocchi (Laterza 2014)
RITORNI DI FIAMMA. Storie Italiane, by Mario Isnenghi, (Feltrinelli 2014)
STORIA INTIMA DELLA GRANDE GUERRA. Lettere, diari e memorie dei soldati
al fronte, by Quinto Antonelli (Donzelli 2014)
The Two Italians Winners rewarded in Washington are:
LACCI, by Domenico Starnone ( Einaudi, 2014)
STORIA INTIMA DELLA GRANDE GUERRA. LETTERE, DIARI E MEMORIE DEI SOLDATI
DAL FRONTE, by Quinto Antonelli ( Donzelli, 2014)
Books in competition for the 2015 edition
AMERICAN FICTION
BEFORE, DURING, AFTER, by Richard Bausch (Knopf 2014)
CITIZEN, AN AMERICAN LYRIC, by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf 2014)
LAND OF LOVE AND DROWNING, byTiphanieYanique (Riverhead 2014)
THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, by Laila Lalami (Pantheon, 2014)
NEVERHOME, by Laird Hunt (Little, Brown a Company 2014)
AMERICAN NONFICTION
A CINEMA OF POETRY. Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film, by Joseph Luzzi
(John Hopkins University Press 2014)
FASCISM, ARCHITECTURE, AND THE CLAIMING OF MODERN MILAN, 1923-43, by Lucy
Maulsby (Toronto University Press 2014)
JUVENESCENCE. A Cultural History of Our Age, by Robert Pogue Harrison
(Chicago UP 2014)
LAUGHTER IN ANCIENT ROME, by Mary Beard
(University of California Press 2014)
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA. Artist and Man, by James R. Banker
(Oxford University Press 2014)
The Two American Winners rewarded in Rome are:
NEVERHOME, by Laird Hunt (Little, Brown a Company 2014)
JUVENESCENCE. A Cultural History of Our Age, by Robert Pogue Harrison (Chicago UP 2014)
SYNOPSIS AND BIOS
FICTION ITALIAN WINNER 2015 - LACCI, by Domenico Starnone, Einaudi 2014
"In case you have forgotten, sir, I’m going to remind you: I'm your wife." This is how the letter
begins. This is the letter Vanda writes to her husband who ran away from home, leaving her in the
grip of a storm of impotent rage and questions that do not have an answer. They married young in
the early sixties, because of a desire for independence, but then the world around them has changed,
and now in their thirty plus they find that to have a family has become a sign of backwardness
rather than autonomy. So now he lives in Rome, in love with a young woman with whom the days
are always joyful, and she in Naples with the children, where she suffers for the growth of silence
and estrangement. What are we willing to sacrifice in order not to feel trapped? And what do we
lose when we choose to retrace our steps? Nothing is more radical than abandonment, but nothing is
more tenacious of those invisible bonds that tie people to one another. And sometimes just a
minimal gesture can bring back what we have tried to put aside. Domenico Starnone gives us an
emotional and powerful story, a tale of abandonment, return, and all the failures that seem
insurmountable and that accompany us for a lifetime.
Domenico Starnone (Saviano, near Naples,1943) is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist.
He lives in Rome. He has worked for several newspapers and satirical magazines,
including L'Unità, Il Manifesto, Tango, and Cuore, usually about episodes of his life as a high
school teacher. He also works as screenwriter. The movies La scuola (by Daniele Luchetti)
and Denti (by Gabriele Salvatores) are based on his books.
He is the author of eight novels, and numerous books of non-fiction. In 2001, he was the recipient
of Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega, with the novel Via Gemito.
NON FICTION ITALIAN WINNER 2015 - STORIA INTIMA DELLA GRANDE
GUERRA. LETTERE, DIARI E MEMORIE DEI SOLDATI DAL FRONTE, by
Quinto Antonelli, Donzelli 2014
This book is not for us. We are intruders who peek into the letters and diaries of the soldiers. Their
letters were in fact part of an intimate communication, with the family. Officers who write to the
family also have in mind ‘posterity, but the writers of these pages are mostly privates (who, before
being called to war were workers, farmers, craftsmen), with the sole ambition to reach their
families, to defend the communication bridge that the conflict threatens to interrupt. It is a rich
collection hosted at the Historical Museum of Trentino, long excluded from the national narrative,
because it was considered marginal, if not confrontational: the authors are in fact "all" Italians, even
those who a century ago were subjects of Austria. Shocking are the bitterness, the anger of the
soldiers, and the ease with which the war was able to lead them to madness: the volume includes the
DVD Fools of War, the documentary that Enrico Verra dedicated to soldiers suffering from
psychoneurosis, segregated in mental hospitals and undergoing often cruel treatment. The
phenomenon of those known as "fools of war" is probably just the tip of a wider malaise, a madness
that runs deep and that found in that war one of his most horrendous manifestations.
Quinto Antonelli (Rovereto, 1952) is in charge of the “Archivio della scrittura popolare” at the
Museo Storico del Trentino. He is the editor of the series “Scritture di guerra,” published jointly by
Museo Storico del Trentino and Museo Storico della Guerra di Rovereto. He is one of the founders
of the history magazine “Materiali di lavoro” and of the “Archivio della scrittura popolare.” He
contributed to La Grande Guerra, published by UTET.
His interests are: autobiographies of the common people, educational programs, and the twentieth
century wars. On these themes, in 2008, he published with Il Margine I dimenticati della grande
Guerra. La memoria dei combattenti trentini (1914-1920).
FICTION AMERICAN WINNER 2015 - NEVERHOME, by Laird Hunt, Little, Brown
a Company 2014
She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name. She is a farmer's faithful wife, but she has left her
husband to don the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. Neverhome tells the harrowing
story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and hysteria and
heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman and a traitor to the American cause.
Laird Hunt's dazzling new novel throws a light on the adventurous women who chose to fight
instead of stay behind. It is also a mystery story: why did Ash leave and her husband stay? Why can
she not return? What will she have to go through to make it back home? In gorgeous prose, Hunt's
rebellious young heroine fights her way through history, and back home to her husband, and finally
into our hearts.
Laird Hunt is the award-winning author of novels and a collection of short works that intersect
several genres, including experimental literature, exploratory fiction, literary noir, speculative
fiction. In particular The Paris Stories (2000) and five novels published by Coffee House Press:
The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), The Exquisite (2006 ) Ray of the Star (2009) and
One Kind (2012), which was listed as a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and
was the winner of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. His latest novel Neverhome, was
published in the US by Little, Brown &Company in 2014 and by Chatto in the UK. His books are
published in France, in Japan, Spain, Germany and Turkey. Hunt is currently professor in the
Creative Writing program at Denver University, and lives with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos,
and his daughter
in Colorado.
NON FICTION AMERICAN WINNER 2015 - JUVENESCENCE. A Cultural History
of Our Age, by Robert Pogue Harrison, Chicago UP 2014
Robert Pogue Harrison's books, Juvenescence ranges brilliantly across cultures and history, tracing
the ways that the spirits of youth and age have inflected each other from antiquity to the present.
Drawing on the scientific concept of neotony, or the retention of juvenile characteristics through
adulthood, and extending it into the cultural realm, Harrison argues that youth is essential for
culture’s innovative drive and flashes of genius. At the same time, however, youth is a luxury that
requires the stability and wisdom of our elders and the institutions.
Robert Pogue Harrison (Smirne, 1954) is a professor of literature at Stanford University, where he
is Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature in the Department of French & Italian. He has been
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007. Harrison began his academic
career as a Dante scholar, in particular focused on the Vita Nova. His work quickly expanded to
concern itself broadly with the Western literary and philosophical tradition, focusing on the human
place in nature and what he calls "the humic foundations" of human culture. His studies of symbols
and images in Western literature are expressed in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, a wideranging history of the religious, mythological, literary, and philosophical role of forests in the
Western imagination. This book that made him known globally was published by University of
Chicago Press in 1992, then published in Italy by Garzanti in 1995 entitled Foreste. His other works
are The Body of Beatrice and The Dominion of the Dead, Gardens: An Essay on the human
condition, both published by the University of Chicago Press.