Romanautoren

From the author of Mrs Engels and The Sisters Mao, an intimate family memoir about filial love and its limits, separation, and loss.Gavin is spending the quarantine with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has returned home to care for her and to write a novel. But all he can write about is her. In this frank and revealing memoir, he unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling out of place as a child, homophobic bullying at school, his brother's mental illness and drug addiction, his father's sudden death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection. Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late.

Tutto comincia con "Delitto e castigo", un romanzo che Paolo Nori legge da ragazzo: è una iniziazione e, al contempo, un'avventura. La scoperta è a suo modo violenta: quel romanzo, pubblicato centododici anni prima, a tremila chilometri di distanza, apre una ferita che non smette di sanguinare. "Sanguino ancora. Perché?" si chiede Paolo Nori, e la sua è una risposta altrettanto sanguinosa, anzi è un romanzo che racconta di un uomo che non ha mai smesso di trovarsi tanto spaesato quanto spietatamente esposto al suo tempo. Se da una parte Nori ricostruisce gli eventi capitali della vita di Fëdor M. Dostoevskij, dall'altra lascia emergere ciò che di sé, quasi fraternamente, Dostoevskij gli lascia raccontare. Perché di questa prossimità è fatta la convivenza con lo scrittore che più di ogni altro ci chiede di bruciare la distanza fra la nostra e la sua esperienza di esistere. Ingegnere senza vocazione, genio precoce della letteratura, nuovo Gogol', aspirante rivoluzionario, condannato a morte, confinato in Siberia, cittadino perplesso della "città più astratta e premeditata del globo terracqueo", giocatore incapace e disperato, marito innamorato, padre incredulo ("Abbiate dei figli! Non c'è al mondo felicità più grande", è lui che lo scrive), goffo, calvo, un po' gobbo, vecchio fin da quando è giovane, uomo malato, confuso, contraddittorio, disperato, ridicolo, così simile a noi. Quanto ci chiama, sembra chiedere Paolo Nori, quanto ci chiama a sentire la sua disarmante prossimità, il suo essere ferocemente solo, la sua smagliante unicità? Quanto ci chiama a riconoscere dove la sua ferita continua a sanguinare?

'I was wowed and moved' Tracy Chevalier <BR><BR>Anne Brontë is the forgotten Brontë sister, overshadowed by her older siblings - virtuous, successful Charlotte, free-spirited Emily and dissolute Branwell. Tragic, virginal, sweet, stoic, selfless, Anne. The less talented Brontë, the other Brontë. <BR><BR>Take Courage is Samantha's personal, poignant and surprising journey into the life and work of a woman sidelined by history. A brave, strongly feminist writer well ahead of her time - and her more celebrated siblings - and who has much to teach us today about how to find our way in the world.

In 1837 George Borrow, the brilliant polyglot and future author of best-sellers, arrived in Madrid as agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society with the assignment to print and distribute a Protestant version of the New Testament in a staunchly Catholic land. In the first months of the year he saw through to press an edition of no fewer than 5,000 copies. Then he spent the next three years selling the book, against tremendous opposition from the Catholic Church and hostile conservative authorities, in all the nooks and corners of the land, to all classes of Spanish society, in big cities and in tiny villages. Thrice imprisoned, a dozen times nearly killed by bandits, firing-squad, disease or accident, Borrow persisted where saner men would soon have yielded. When at last he returned to England, the greater part of his 'Scio New Testament' had been duly sold to noblemen, donkey-drivers and jailbirds, to 'muleteers, carmen, and contrabandistas', to city bourgeois and intellectuals craving for a look at Europe's most fundamental text. A Daring Game does not repeat the whole story of Borrow's adventures as told in his sensational 1843 travelogue 'The Bible in Spain'. Instead, it investigates the conditions and circumstances under which Borrow's New Testament was produced and distributed, and for the first time in two centuries calculates the exact numbers of sales attained by a bookseller of genius in a land plagued by war, pestilence, ignorance and hatred.

Paperback