In its almost three years of life ‘Sotto il vulcano’ – edited for Feltrinelli by Marino Sinibaldi and Federico Bona – has been an experiment between past and present: a quarterly literary magazine, more or less monographic, which has tried to trace a map of post-pandemic anxieties (but with well-previous origins) practically drawing on the best of our literature to experiment with tones and themes across a very broad spectrum.
From this experience was born ‘Fires’ (Feltrinelli, pp. 249, 22 euros), an anthology which – as Sinibaldi explains in his preface – uses this ‘volcanic’ metaphor to draw a non-exhaustive geography of the “new territory and of the feelings that inhabit it”. There are thirty stories – from Chiara Gamberale to Michele Serra, from Donatella Di Pietrantonio to Paolo Giordano – created for monographic issues with different themes, and therefore inevitably heterogeneous, which however, fragment after fragment, compose an overall coherent whole.
There are the ‘mutants’ who – as if chasing the desires of a teenager – undergo dozens of operations to look like Ken, there are girls fleeing from Naples and from their own lives who find them inside themselves in front of a funeral pyre in deep Chile, there are the bandits of the nineteenth century and books written by machines and of course difficult loves in a complicated time like ours and bodies “that touch each other, embrace each other, but are not always able to remain so close”. Not everything is perfect obviously, and the language used is often (deliberately or otherwise) the language dirtied by social media, but ‘Fires’ – which will be presented on Friday 22 November at 6pm in Rome, at the Treccani Institute together with the volume “Un anno of stories” – it’s like an almanac of these years. We may not like everything, but there is a piece of us in everything.