Michael F. Moore – författare

“The first English translation in more than fifty years of Alessandro Manzoni’s masterpiece, a work of foundational Italian literature on par with the Divine Comedy and the Decameron.”—The Wall Street Journal“An exemplary historical novel” (The New Yorker) from the father of modern Italian literature, The Betrothed receives its first new English-language translation in fifty years, hailed as “a landmark literary occasion” by Jhumpa Lahiri.ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New YorkerThe Betrothed is a cornerstone of Italian culture, language, and literature. Published in its final form in 1842, The Betrothed has inspired generations of Italian readers and writers. Giuseppe Verdi composed his majestic Requiem Mass in honor of Manzoni. Italo Calvino called the novel “a classic that has never ceased shaping reality in Italy” while Umberto Eco praised its author as a “most subtle critic and analyst of languages.” The Betrothed has been celebrated by Primo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, and is one of Pope Francis’s favorite books. But, until now, it has remained relatively unknown to English readers.In the fall of 1628, two young lovers are forced to flee their village on the shores of Lake Como after a powerful lord prevents their marriage, plunging them into the maelstrom of history. Manzoni draws on actual people and events to create an unforgettable fresco of Italian life and society. In this greatest of historical novels, he takes the reader on a journey through the Spanish occupation of Milan, the ravages of war, class tensions, social injustice, religious faith, and a plague that devastates northern Italy. But within Manzoni’s epic tale, readers will also hear powerful echoes of our own day.Michael F. Moore’s dynamic new translation of The Betrothed brings to life Manzoni’s timeless literary masterpiece.

Following two outcasts’ tumultuous friendship, this brilliant, Strega Prize–winning novel captures the probing, passionate nature of a generation of global citizens, exploring sexuality and identity.I never understood, of the two of us, which one was warm and which cold, but I consider myself lucky to have met my opposite front in Claudia Fanelli, the spatriata, the name people around here use for the uncertain, the odd, the unclassifiable and sometimes the shiftless or orphans, as well as unmarried men or women, vagrants and vagabonds, or even, in the case that concerns us, the emancipated.Claudia enters Francesco’s life on a sunny morning, in the school’s entrance hall: it’s a bolt of lightning, the birth of an entirely new kind of desire, which is, above all, the desire for life. Claudia is peerless and self-assured, extravagant; Francesco is introverted, burning with erotic curiosity, dominated by rustic faith, uncertain. She provokes him: “Did you know that your mother and my father were lovers?” But in the eyes of that meek boy, she glimpses a spark of rebellion: she sees herself in him. They become adults together, in a symbiotic game of escape and pursuit, in which they always end up finding each other.Mario Desiati captures the complexities of a fluid, uprooted generation: his own. A generation around forty years old today, who weren’t afraid to stray far from home to find their place in the world, who truly feel like citizens of Europe. With a poetic yet biting style, capable of great tenderness, Desiati depicts the myriad forms that desire can assume when given free rein. Without any fear of plucking the chords of romanticism, without any false modesty as he delves into the coarsest details of sensuality and instinct.

In this heartbreaking yet hopeful autobiographical novel, an acclaimed Italian author who lost his partner to suicide testifies to the power of storytelling in living with grief.When 30-year-old Matteo B. Bianchi published his debut novel in 1999, the timing couldn’t have been worse: he had just lost S., the man he’d lived with for 7 years, who one day, a few months after they broke up, killed himself in their apartment.Matteo discovers the body. He feels trapped in a labyrinth of contradictory emotions and constant bewilderment, which unites all the so-called survivors of the suicide of a loved one. Yet even in his darkest hours, the writer in him starts taking notes. At first they are just fragments, shards of an existence shattered into a thousand pieces. Then they slowly transform and, memory after memory, become a profound conversation with S., caught between the temptation to let go and the desire to get back to life.Both radical and vulnerable, intimate and universal, The Life of Those Who Remain is a devastating but luminous novel about surviving the aftermath of trauma. Bianchi produces pages of excruciating beauty, recounting his journey to redemption and rebirth, and showing how, even in the depths of the most unspeakable pain, writing—his own, and also powerful works such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous—can still save us.