Interview with Andrea Colamedici and Maura Gancitano (Tlon Editions)

Here we are again, interviewing Italian publishing houses, large and small, about their identity and the projection of that identity abroad. This time, the focus is on Tlon, and we talk to the founders of the project (which also includes a publishing house), Andrea Colamedici and Maura Gancitano.

How would you describe the identity of the Tlon publishing house to readers of newitalianbooks abroad?

Edizioni Tlon is a cultural project founded in 2015 by myself, Andrea Colamedici and Nicola Bonimelli. We wanted to convey the idea that philosophy is not something boring and abstract in relation to life but that, on the contrary, it is essential for understanding oneself and the facts of the world.

Right from the start, Tlon launched cultural initiatives, Andrea and I started looking after our philosophical activity and talking about it on social media (first on Facebook, then also on Instagram) and in 2016 the publishing house Edizioni Tlon and the Libreria Teatro Tlon in Rome were born.

Today we also run two art-related bookshops: one at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art and the other at the French Institute in Rome.

The publishing house publishes philosophical essays (the ‘Planetari Big’ series), essays on gender studies (the ‘Numeri Primi’ series), essays on current affairs from a philosophical perspective (the ‘Soglie et Urano’ series), philosophical pamphlets (the ‘Dardi’ series), books on spiritual practices and theories (the ‘Radici’ series), novels (the ‘Finzioni’ series), poetry (the ‘Controcielo’ series) and art catalogues (the ‘Tlon Aleph’ series).

What are your characteristics and strengths?

For us, books are fundamental talismans and compasses in these times, because at a time of great disorientation, when deep attention seems very rare and trying, they help us to trace paths of understanding, both intimate and collective.

It’s also for this reason that the publishing house has been part of a wider distribution project from the outset. Our books serve to build bridges between themes and attitudes, but also between people, by shedding new light on aspects of reality that we take for granted.

Let me quote one of our books to explain myself better: we recently published How like a Leaf (Come una foglia), a conversation between Thyrza Nichols Goodeeve and Donna J. Haraway. Its very form reveals Haraway’s philosophy: it is a dialogue with one of her former students, in which the biologist’s private life is interwoven with her studies and reasoning, and in which her relationship with Goodeeve is an integral part of the narrative. Haraway is, among other things, a theorist of making kin, of the creation of new kinships, of union rethought. We feel very close to this approach, in which multidisciplinarity is not a dissipation but an enrichment.

We choose to publish contemporary authors – for example Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Darío Sztajnszrajber, Lucie Azema – but also philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk, Laurent De Sutter, Franco Bifo Berardi, and poets such as Anne Carson, Frank Bidart and Giorgiomaria Cornelio. We’re not afraid to mix languages, registers and genres, but we want the catalogue to represent an ‘editorial snake’, as Roberto Calasso defined it: each book should be as unique as possible, and therefore different from the others, but it should also contribute to creating a coherent editorial path, which holds together the active life – the themes of public debate, the major social problems we face – and the contemplative life, in other words everything that concerns the human depths and escapes historicity.

That’s why we’re also interested in recovering important books that have disappeared from the publishing market. This happened with How like a Leaf, with The Beauty Myth (Il mito della bellezza) by Naomi Wolf, and it’s about to happen with L’Amour en plus: Histoire de l’amour maternel, XVIIe-XXe siècle (L’amore in più. Storia dell’amore materno) by Élisabeth Badinter, which has been absent from Italian bookshops for a number of years and which we thought essential to bring back to light.

What bets, literary or otherwise, have worked best in Italy and other countries, and why do you think that is?

As with any publishing venture, it’s not always easy to predict public taste and interest. Our great fortune is that we have a large community of readers who follow our publications and allow us to understand immediately how a certain book will be received, and with what implication.

What I can say is that the books that have immediately captured the interest of the Edizioni Tlon community have always become bestsellers, and so continue to enliven our catalogue years later and garner favourable reviews from those who have read them.

Among the books that have marked our journey is undoubtedly La società della performance, written by myself and Andrea in 2018, which analyses the contemporary condition that leads to chronic fatigue and a lack of meaning in life. A big surprise was Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power (Il mostruoso femminile. Il patriarcato e la paura delle donne) by Jude Ellison S. Doyle, an essay on the representation of femininity in the midst of millenarian cosmogonies, horror and TV series, which came out in 2021 and won over tens of thousands of readers by word of mouth.

The new edition of Naomi Wolf’s The Myth of Beauty, which sheds light on the relationship between society and the female body, has also been very well received. We wanted to reintroduce it because of its historical importance and because, unfortunately, it remains extraordinarily topical.

Two excellent Italian works were presented for the first time this year: Neurodivergente. Capire e coltivare la diversità dei cervelli umani by Eleonora Marocchini, an essay on which we worked with great conviction because we had intercepted a great editorial void on the subject in Italy, and Femminismo Terrone by Claudia Fauzia and Valentina Amenta, released a few weeks ago, which analyses the stereotypes about the South that this country thinks it has overcome, but which in reality are still very present in our eyes.

In general, Edizioni Tlon’s readership is not afraid of complexity or of tackling unfamiliar subjects, but it is driven by a great curiosity and a willingness to open up to new points of view.