Interview with Silvia Costantino and Francesco Quatraro (effequ publishing house)

This new instalment of newitalianbooks’ series of interviews with editors and publishers of Italian publishing houses continues with effequ (that’s how it’s spelt, all in lower case), and two voices belonging to Silvia Costantino and Francesco Quatraro, its editors-in-chief, who respond together.

As usual, the question is:

“How would you describe the identity of the effequ publishing house to the readers of newitalianbooks abroad? What are its characteristics and strengths? Which bets, literary and otherwise, have worked best in Italy and possibly in other countries, and in your opinion, why?”

Perhaps it is easier to say what we are not, what we do not want. What effequ is not, then: effequ is not an independent publishing house, because it depends very much on a series of factors over which it has no control (distribution, promotion, the choices of readers and booksellers); effequ is not a quality publishing house, because we know very well that quality is a relative notion; effequ is certainly not a courageous publishing house, because it is always very careful not to bite off more than it can chew. We do not, in short, want to describe ourselves in a self-absorbed and high-sounding way: what we are, and what we want, is to build a solid and honest proposal that reflects our interests and our way of acting, thinking, reading and exploring.

We like to define ourselves as “a twisted publishing house”, taking up the idea of transversality that is opposed to a straight and preset path, that allows itself to stray and that, actually, traverses the infinite range of possibilities of the present.

This is why our Italian fiction series, the ‘Rondini’, is so difficult to define and place: it does not follow a specific genre, but seeks out voices and names that can define a feeling, a sensation. In the same series, which provides for the publication of only four titles a year, one thus finds a so-called ‘propositional novel’, experimental in language and imagery, such as Questo è il corpo by Simone Marcelli Pitzalis, next to a much more classically popular novel such as Maria Malva by Emiliano Dominici, a book not at all about plot and very much about language and voice such as Padre occidentale by Simone Lisi, and yet another foray into the fantastic such as the Dorsale trilogy by Maria Gaia Belli, or the subtle dystopia by Marianna Crasto in Il senso della fine. These are books that seem distant from each other but are instead united by the need to look at the present in a lateral way, to recount an experience, even if it is pellicular, but linked to the fabric of our imagination, of our territory, and in any case with a markedly personal language that does not suffer from tired mannerisms.

More easily identifiable and clear-cut in its intentions is non-fiction, so-called “Saggi pop”: a continuous research that aims to authoritatively yet accessibly investigate every fold of our complex and constantly accelerating present, tracing its distortions, yes, but also its positive thrusts, and trying to identify solutions that are often expressed in an insistent return to collectivity and sharing. It is a series with clear political positioning, just like the people who run it: effequ is a transfeminist, libertarian publishing house, in decisive opposition to all forms of oppression and control of minorities. This is why its best-known books include titles such as the bestseller Per una rivoluzione degli affetti by Brigitte Vasallo, but also Eccentrico. L’autismo in un saggio autobiografico by Fabrizio Acanfora, and then there’s the title, which became a scandalous focal point and sparked years of – mostly superficial – debate in the Italian media. : Femminili singolari by Vera Gheno.

Then there are the other projects, those that are even more distinctly experimental: the magazine Calibano, which we produce and edit together with the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome and which does not talk about opera at all, but uses it as a prism to reflect and illuminate the present; the “Elettra” series, small pocket books that investigate the relationship between female narrators and narratives of the father by putting him at the centre; the “Scatoline” series, alphabetical essays for the very young and very young, each issue a word in common use, analysed and explored so that it reveals the worlds it contains.

The effequ publishing house produces almost exclusively Italian literature and non-fiction with the exception of one translated essay a year, but the double acquisition, in English and Spanish, of Menti parallele by Laura Tripaldi – a complex, rich, dense and futuristic text – shows us that the road of transversality is to be preferred. And if it is increasingly difficult for fiction, because of those dependency factors mentioned earlier, the intention remains to persevere, to search, to experiment again.