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      • Horror & ghost stories

        WRATH OF N’KAI

        AN ARKHAM HORROR NOVEL

        by Josh Reynolds

        The first in a new range of novels of eldritch adventure from the wildly popular Arkham Horror – an international thief of esoteric artifacts stumbles onto a nightmarish cult in 1920s New England Countess Alessandra Zorzi, international adventurer and thief, arrives in Arkham pursuing an ancient body freshly exhumed from a mound in Oklahoma, of curious provenance and peculiar characteristics. But before she can steal it, another party beats her to it. During the resulting gunfight at the Miskatonic Museum, the countess makes eye contact with the petrified corpse and begins an adventure of discovery outside her wildest experiences. Now, caught between her mysterious client, the police, and a society of necrophagic connoisseurs, she finds herself on the trail of a resurrected mummy as well as the star-born terror gestating within it.

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2018

        Byzantine Venice

        From the foundation myth to 1082

        by Nicola Bergamo

        Nicola Bergamo's in-depth study proposes an historical excursus on the evolution of relations between the nascent city of Venice and the powerful Byzantine empire, from the first Venetian settlements in the lagoon eaves of the Augustan X Regio Venetia et Histria, through the devastating gothic wars and the Longobard invasion, until the fiscal liberation of 1082 with the chrysobolla granted by the basileus Alessio I Comneno, which greatly increased the commercial fortune of the Venetians within the Mediterranean, consolidating what would become a shining thousand-year-old republic. A change also in the political power that from the exarch, the tribune and the magister militum would pass to the elite families who elected the first duces, and would move its centre of gravity from the primitive capital Civitanova on the mainland to the lagoon nucleus of Rivoalto around which the city would develop, seeking a solution to the continuous struggles between the patriarchates of Grado and Aquileia and the assaults of the Narentan pirates who crossed the ships on their way to Constantinople.The essay is accompanied by an introductory text by PierAlvise Zorzi.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2015

        Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy

        by Edited by Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi

        The physical and mental capacity of having emotions is universal. The methods through which these emotions are perceived, expressed, and shared are always depending by the codified rules imposed by the society and the personal background. Emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectations, and moral beliefs. This means that every culture has its rules for feelings and behavior; every culture thus exerts certain restraints while favoring certain forms of expressivity. Hate, fear, cruelty, and love are always turning history into the history of passion and lust, because emotional life is always ready to overflow intellectual life.   This fascinating study of emotion in Renaissance Italy shows that emotions are built and created by the society in which they are expressed and conditioned. The contributors examine, among others, the emotional language of the court, around public execution, religious practices and during outbreaks of disease.

      • Ossigeno

        by Sacha Naspini

        Paul Auster meets Stephen King in this poetic yet disturbing investigation into the darkest corners of human nature. After the coral, ambitious Le case del malcontento, Sasha Naspini comes back with a tightly plotted narrative that keeps you at the edge of your seat from page one to the very end, while drawing with sharp sensibility broken characters who fight against all odds to put their pieces back together in unexpected new shapes.   Laura disappears on the 12th of August 1999, at eight years old. She is found 14 years later in a bunker. She’s 22 now. Luca is having dinner with his father, just another evening, always the same for the last thirty years. Someone knocks at the door: it’s the police. What happens if one day you find out the person who raised you is a monster? Ossigeno is the story of those who stay after everything and everyone else have gone. The arrest of the monster is the beginning of a new life, one that seemed impossible to imagine – there are no cages anymore, but the characters are nevertheless stuck in their own minds, made of memories and scars they can’t forget. Luca’s father was his bridge to reality, he was his moral compass, someone to look up to. After the death of his mother, he had become his whole family. And throughout this whole time, he was monster. Where does this leave Luca? Is he a monster too, for sharing is father’s blood? Meanwhile, Laura is trying hard to live again. Her mother doesn’t know how to talk to her. Laura smiles, she acts normal. She likes to wander around the city – she likes to get lost in the crowd. But sometimes she feels the need to be surrounded by walls. She locks herself in a random bathroom. She could stay there for hours, until someone knocks. No one knows what she’s doing in there. Ossigeno is a matrioska. Characters close themselves in dark boxes – and a boy in Wyoming hides in a locket, not knowing he has always been captive inside someone else’s nightmare.   Ossigeno is not a psychological thriller – it is not a crime novel. It is a story of dark roots and curious, eerie minds. Of secrets buried so deep that become seeds for madness. Of masks worn so tightly they become your own skin. But what’s underneath, no matter how hard you try, is still there. Hidden. Observing. Waiting to see what happens. Sasha Naspini’s previous novel, Le Case del malcontento, was sold in China, Korea, Greece and Turkey and is being considered by many publishers worldwide. Its passionate, extremely sophisticated story-telling and unforgettable characterization makes it a psychological masterpiece, an analysis on the complexity of human nature – I would say it’s the Italian Spoon River Anthology, and the title has also been compared to Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. With a vernacular yet classical, literary language, and multiple points of view, Le Case is an epic rural tale with a universal echo. The novel plays with genres, mixing noir, psychological thriller, historical memoir and dark fairy-tale.

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