Michele Mari - Böcker

Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy’s most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters.Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well grow up beastly – or never grow up at all. Waking or sleeping, the obsessions of Mari’s youth seem to haunt his every adult thought. You, Bleeding Childhood stands as his first attempt to catalogue this cabinet of wonders.Cult classics since their first publication, these loosely connected stories stand as the ideal introduction to a fantasist on a par with Kafka, Poe, and Borges.

Winner of the 2025 PEN Translation PrizeWinner of the 2025 Italian Prose in Translation PrizeA lonely little boy’s unlikely friendship with his grandparents’ grizzled old groundskeeper leads him down the rabbit hole from a life lived solely in books to a wonderful and terrifying hell of long-buried secrets, shadowy partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, bloodthirsty slugs, and the unquiet dead.