The first two issues of Granta Italia (Work and Sex), have featured well known writers from the English language editions of the magazine including Salman Rushdie and Téa Obreht and Italian authors of renown including Giorgia Vasta and Walter Siti, alongside more up and coming talents. However, for their third issue, Granta Italia decided to feature previously unpublished writers, the result is Che Cosa Si Scrive Quando Si Scrive In Italia (What We Write About When We Write About Italy). Granta Italia editor Paolo Zaninoni spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the joys of uncovering new talents and why age doesn’t always matter when it comes to writing good prose.

TH: Is this new direction an attempt to uncover a fresh generation of Italian voices?

PZ: It most certainly is. There is an increasing amount of room for young authors in the Italian publishing scene, with regular reviews of first time writers in the newspapers. However, we wanted to take this one step further and focus solely on this group of writers. In doing so we wanted to sound out new territory.

You’ve collaborated with a number of prizes and writing schools in a bid to help to broaden your search. Were you encouraged by what you found and do you think that Italy has a vibrant young reading and writing culture?

We were surprised by how mature and how different the voices we found turned out to be. Each of these writers have very distinctive styles of their own.

Image from ‘Retratti’ by Martino Pietropoli.

The photo essay in the issue is particularly striking, partly because it is also a debut photographer, but also because the faces of the young ragazzi are all obscured. Is this in part a comment on a generation that is in some ways in danger of being lost amidst an economic and political collapse?

Our brilliant photo editor Federico Del Prete has selected a series of stunning faceless portraits that remain open to interpretation. I think his and the young photographer Martino Pietropoli’s idea was not just to describe a generation but also to involve the spectator in the creation of meaning.

Where you surprised by the issues that this new generation of writers are focused on? Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of concerns they raise?

I am happy to say that I do not feel our authors set out to reflect their age or their epoch: they are not into literature as sociology. In this issue there are stories of love, death, friendship, work and above all, a strenuous concern for writing good prose.

Many of the contributors are quite young, several in their early thirties. Yet many write with a great deal of authority and precision about the difficulties of domesticity and family life. Do you think that whilst experience can be a vital asset for a writer, many can also produce their best work when they are young?

I am not sure that age is the point here. I guess you could say that literature is as good a fuel for writing as life itself, and that most of these authors have obviously been absorbing some very good literature.

There is a touching story here (‘Martino’ by Chiara Marchetti) which is in part about a woman who is mourning the death of her pet cactus. Are short stories able to illuminate these kinds of little disasters that can otherwise be overlooked?

The story is touching and exquisitely written, and one of the virtues of a good short story, and certainly of Chiara’s, is the ability to focus on small, slightly off-key details that lend meaning to the whole – not just the pet cactus, but a haircut, the lighting of a cigarette.

Can you tell us what the next issue is likely to be?

We are toying with a few ideas, one including an Italian city.

The latest issue of Granta Italia features: Luciano Funetta, Chiara Marchetti, Roberto Risso, Piergianni Curti, Danilo Deninotti, Francesca Mazia Esposito, Martino Pietropoli, Michele Di Palma, Mari Accardi, Leonardo Staglianò, Stefania Bruno, Laura Taffanello, Nicola Ingenito, Angelo Lippolis, Ferdinando Morgana, Domiano Zerneri.

John Freeman will be in discussion with Paolo Zaninoni at the Circolo dei lettori for the launch of the new issue, this evening (7 May) at 9 p.m. More details here.

Photo by Anthony Albright.

Granta Italia has launched its second issue, Sex (Sesso), which includes translated work from Granta 110: Sex, as well as other recent issues. Online editor Ted Hodgkinson spoke to Granta Italia editor Paolo Zaninoni about curating Sex, the persistence of inequality and what Italians make of the purse.

TH: Many of the stories by Italians in the issue focus on the shortcomings or failures of the body: from Matteo B. Bianchi’s story ‘Fragile’ in which the narrator awaits a man missing a leg, to Chiara Valerio’s story which last line is ‘The dogmas of the hand’, to Diego de Silva’s ‘Corpo a Corpo’ to Valeria Parella’s exploration of blindness and sight. Is this theme of bodily failure related to other big shifts that have been occurring in Italy at present?

PZ: I think that the metaphor of bodily failure is a very apt one to reflect 
the feeling of weakness and despondency palpable today within the Italian 
society (and maybe a few more). The body politic is experiencing a lack of
 tension and ambition that is very easy and tempting to portray through
 metaphors centered on the physical body.

The issue features a dark playscript by Emma Dante between an unnamed man and women in a hotel room. Do you think that Italian sexual politics has changed significantly in recent years or does inequality persist, as Berlusconi’s behaviour would have many believe?

Inequality does persist, unfortunately, both in the society and in itself-representation, and it has serious consequences, even economic ones.
 It goes back to the Eighties, even before Berlusconi the politician came
 around - but the TV mogul was active already. I must add that awareness of
 this situation is on the rise within the Italian society, and many men and 
women are starting to say ‘enough’. Perhaps the fact that a number of the
 best contemporary Italian authors are women will help.

The Italian edition of Sex contains an array of pieces that have appeared in several recent issues of Granta, with only two (by Mark Doty and Marie Darrieussecq) from the Sex issue. Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Hot Air Balloons’ and Jeannette Winterson’s ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ both appeared in The F Word, ‘Here Is What I Do’ by Chris Dennis appeared in Aliens and Iris Murdoch’s letters and the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie story ‘Ceiling’ were in Going Back. As editor, is part of the pleasure in creating your own recipe from these previous issues?

It is indeed an immense and always new pleasure - all the more so because 
it is shared with a variety of editors and contributors.

In our edition of Sex we featured a photo essay of vacant porn sets by Jo Broughton which explored the sadness of these spaces and their attempts to manufacture intimacy. Your photo essay reverses this by placing dapper co-workers in erotic positions. Is this just true to life in the offices of Granta Italia or is there a more subtle comment going on here?

Like a lot of people we work in rather drab office spaces, and we
 certainly try to bring some joy to them - though not in the way portrayed 
by the wonderful Jo Broughton.

How have Italian readers responded to the purse cover?



You mean it is a purse?
 ■

Last month at the Turin Book Fair, Granta launched its third foreign edition. Granta Italia’s first issue is devoted to Work and features translated pieces that originally appear in Granta 109 alongside new works from the best of Italy’s contemporary writers. Paolo Zaninoni, editor of Granta Italia and Editorial Director of Rizzoli, talked to John Freeman about this exciting new partnership.

JF: How do Italian attitudes about work differ from those of the British or Americans? Do you ever get irritated by our impression that you just sit around in nicely ironed trousers drinking good coffee?

PZ: After almost three years of economic recession and youth unemployment estimated at around twenty per cent, it is fair to say that Italian attitudes towards work have become more serious. A significant part of the country certainly still enjoys a high quality of life and probably the work/life balance is on average better here than in a lot of other countries (including, famously, the US), but jobs are becoming scarce and this makes the mood gloomier than it ever was. An important social scientist has recently described Italy as a country that has lost its taste for life, and many commentators have subscribed to his assessment.

Does Italy have a culture of literary magazines, and why did you think it needed Granta?

It does, indeed. In the thirties it was a bunch of literary magazines (La Voce, Lacerba) that contributed to the renewal of Italian literature, and much of the debate on the role of art and culture that took place in the seventies found an echo in magazines like Alfabeta and Aut Aut, that were literary in a broader sense. Alberto Moravia founded Nuovi argomenti, which still exists. Carlo Emilio Gadda published one of the crucial Italian novels of the twentieth century, his Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, on the magazine Letteratura first. The reason for bringing Granta to Italy is that many of those magazines no longer exist, and, above all, that there has never been an international literary magazine here.

Tell me about some of the Italian writers in this issue. All of them are new to me. Who should we be watching?

The mob – who are very good at telling somebody who can hurt them – have sentenced him to death.

The first answer is: just about everybody, or we would not have selected them! One name: Silvia Avallone. She was the literary debut sensation of 2010 here. Her novel, Acciaio, i.e. Steel, describes what is left of the working class in an industrial mill town in Tuscany with powerful effectiveness and great human feeling. It is interesting to note that another well-received novel by young Italian poet and fiction writer Mario Desiati, just published, also deals with the fate of a former generation of Italian blue-collar workers, this time in Apulia. New Italian writers seem to care a lot about manual work and class relations, more so perhaps than the generation preceding them. They are, in their own way, more politically aware. As an English-language reader you may find it useful to know that Acciaio will be published by Viking Penguin in 2013 in the US; Giorgio Vasta will have his last novel come out from Faber in the UK later this year; Michela Murgia’s Accabadora is due for release from MacLehose Press, again in 2011; and that Marcello Fois has been published in English by Harvill Secker.

Many of us have read (or read about) Roberto Saviano. Do the ways of the Italian government and society place any additional challenges on reporters there, or is his case exceptional?

Roberto Saviano has written about the mob that stifles the lives of decent citizens in the South (and elsewhere). The mob – who are very good at telling somebody who can hurt them – have sentenced him to death. His case is almost without precedent here – but then, so is the force of his writing.

Your next issue is ‘Sex’. How do you think our purse (cover) will go down?

It has already been proudly displayed as a panel at the Granta launch party that we held at the Turin Book Fair. Somebody tried to steal it, so I guess you can say that the critical reception was strong. ■

Also on The F Word Online:

You're a what kind of feminist? A Treatise on Political Philosophy at the Apex of American Empire, or a new poem by Megan Levad.

Domestic terrors: a dramatic reading of Lydia Davis’s ‘The Dreadful Mucamas’, from The F Word.

Yuka Igarashi interviews Taiye Selasi, who made her fiction debut in Granta 115.