Interview with Giovanni Turi, editorial director of TerraRossa

The series of interviews that newitalianbooks is dedicating to Italian publishing houses to promote them abroad continues in this episode with TerraRossa. Editorial director Giovanni Turi is interviewed.

How would you describe the identity of the TerraRossa publishing house to the readers of newitalianbooks abroad? What are its characteristics and strengths?

It’s a publishing house specialising in Italian fiction that only publishes five titles a year, divided into two series: ‘Sperimentali’ (Experimental), unpublished works with a particular focus on new authors; ‘Fondanti’ (Essential), re-publications of recent works that have been discontinued and re-proposed in a new edition. What all our books have in common is that we look for authors with a clearly recognisable voice and style. We love offering the reader stimuli and complexity that force them to leave their comfort zone and become an integral part of literary fruition: it may seem risky in a world and an era that demand more and more readers, spectators and inactive citizens, but for this very reason it becomes increasingly necessary every day. With this, we don’t want to reject simple entertainment, but we believe that it shouldn’t be enough and that this cannot be the purpose of what we call literature.

Which literary and non-literary ventures have worked best in Italy and possibly in other countries and, in your opinion, why?

First of all, in Italy, La casa delle madri (The House of Mothers) by Daniele Petruccioli, which in 2021 reached the last twelve of the Strega Prize: an unthinkable result for such a small publisher and for a debut author, although already known in the literary world as one of its most authoritative translators. His novel is characterised by a hypotactic style of writing, full of asides, parentheses and subordinate clauses, simulating the stratification of reality and the ambiguity of interpretations. Petruccioli is also very good at showing us how antithetical feelings (affection and intolerance, love and hate) coexist in the same family, and how, in some way, places inhabit us and not only the other way around. The only regret is that we haven’t yet managed to get this book translated abroad.

On the contrary, another of our most successful titles, La meravigliosa lampada di Paolo Lunare by Cristò has been translated in Chile and Argentina by Edicola Ediciones and in France, Belgium and Switzerland by Editions Le Soupirail. In this case it is a contemporary love story that follows the Italian magical realism tradition (from Buzzati to Landolfi). In this work, Cristò suggests that in a relationship the truth can often be brutal, unlike an omission or a lie.

One of the most representative authors of the publishing house, acclaimed by critics but known to a still rather limited audience, is Ezio Sinigaglia: his debut novel, Il pantarèi, published in the 1980s and then re-proposed by us in the Fondanti series, has had the most resonance among our readers. A highly original novel in which very short essays of literary criticism on the most innovative authors of the 20th century (from Joyce to Proust, from Céline to Faulkner, from Svevo to Kafka) alternate with the story of the main character — an editorial writer abandoned by his wife, whom he still loves, and who finds himself attracted to young men. Sinigaglia brought postmodernism, autofiction and freedom of desire to Italy 20 years ahead of its time. As for Fifty-Fifty, the book that the author considered his masterpiece, it has been translated abroad: we published it in a two-volume edition, while Galaade, his French publisher, preferred to offer it in a single volume.

Inventario di quel che resta dopo che la foresta brucia, the debut novel by Michele Ruol, is also receiving excellent feedback. It won the Berto Prize and the Megamark Prize, was a finalist for the Mastercard Esordienti Prize, was book of the month on the programme Fahrenheit on Radio3 Rai, presented by Walter Veltroni at the last Strega Prize [and now included in the dozen finalists, Ed.], already optioned by a film production company and undergoing translation in France for Le Tripode (but there has already been interest from US and Serbian publishers). In this case, the success was also undoubtedly due to the originality of the narrative structure: it is a real inventory in which each object is linked to a story, an episode that takes the reader back and forth in time, before and after the catastrophe that involves a family, and it is also thanks to Ruol that she was able to tell the story of mourning in an extremely delicate and balanced way.

Another debut that achieved a fair amount of success, and that deserved even more, was also Mia e la voragine (Mia and the Abyss) by Diana Ligorio, selected for the Campiello Junior Prize. It is the story of a young girl with a limp who tells the story of her relationship with her mother, with her peers and with her own fragility with a dreamy gaze full of imagination. We are certain that she will be an author who will make a name for herself, like Ilaria Grando, whose Lettere minuscole (Lowercase Letters) we have recently published, a story of sublimation of pain through writing, and like the next debutants we will launch between this autumn and next year: Germano Antonucci, Ugo Bertello, Maria Teresa Rovitto, Mattia Cecchini.