We are glad to host (live!!) writer Massimo Gezzi, whose novel “Le stelle vicine” describes, in twelve extraordinary tales, men and women, boys and girls from the suburbs, , being overwhelmed by a whirlwind of daily events triggering anger or happiness, good outcomes or tragedy.
Massimo Gezzi will be in conversation with Enrica Maria Ferrara of Trinity College Dublin. The event, in Italian and English.
Wednesday 13 April 2022, 6.30 pm
Live at the Italian Institute of Culture
Free access but booking essential!!!
The book “Le stelle vicine”
The collection of short-stories “Le stelle vicine” by Massimo Gezzi features characters who live on the margins of society and rarely are given a voice in literature – the man suffering from epilepsy, the old woman with dementia, the small-town bully, the circus artist – or ordinary people observed in extreme situations. Mostly written in the first-person, these texts are like small epiphanies casting light on dark places of the human mind, and confirming Gezzi’s distinctive ability to decode emotions, skilfully intertwining hypermodern and ancestral atmospheres, informal tones and literary references from intellectual and popular culture.
Massimo Gezzi (1976) has published four collections of poetry: Il mare a destra (2004), L’attimo dopo (2009; Metauro and Marazza Giovani Prize) and Il numero dei vivi (2015, Carducci Prize, Tirinnanzi Prize and Schweizer Literaturpreise 2016), Uno di nessuno. Storia di Giovanni Antonelli, poeta (2016). He has also published the trilingual booklet In altre forme/En d’autres formes/In andere Formen (2011) and the volume of reviews and interviews Tra le pagine e il mondo (2015). His poems have been translated into several languages. As a literary critic, Gezzi edited volumes on Eugenio Montale, Franco Buffoni and Adelelmo Ruggieri. His new collection of poetry, Sempre mondo, will be published by Marcos y Marcos in 2022. At present, Gezzi works as a secondary school teacher in Lugano and coordinates the website “Le parole e le cose”. Le stelle vicine is his narrative debut.
Enrica Maria Ferrara lectures in Italian at Trinity College Dublin. She has published widely on Italian literature, theatre and cinema, collaborates with the Irish radio and the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin. As a translator, her most recent volume is Disaster Narratives in Early Modern Naples (Viella, 2018), edited by Cecere et al. Her recent book-length publications include: Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages (co-edited with C. Ó Cuilleanáin, Franco Cesati, 2017); Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity (ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Reading Domenico Starnone (co-edited with S. Milkova, 2021).
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