Books
26 August 2025

Piccolo dizionario delle malattie letterarie

by Rossari, Marco
Piccolo dizionario delle malattie letterarie

Books are a wonderful fever, and we are all infected. But what happens when you get Salinger syndrome? And what is the intellectual’s illness? Have you ever had Henry Miller complex or Pessoa paranoia? What about Flaubertism or Dickinson’s hiccups? In compiling this short, dazzling dictionary, Marco Rossari tells us what it means to be infected by the virus of words. Because it is true that literature is often a powerful medicine, but no one ever told us that the side effects can be dangerous and highly entertaining. With intelligence and sarcasm, Marco Rossari compiles a curious and hilarious list of tics, compulsions, vices, quirks and imaginary illnesses contracted by those who, in life, have chosen to devote themselves body and soul to books. You will find the antidepressant Sedaris, Bernhard’s disease, the fake medicines of self-publishing, the plaquette as a form of bacterial infection contracted through enjambement, and Bukowskitis, which we know we have when we wake up after a hangover and suddenly feel like writers. And then there is the dreaded Franzen syndrome and the adolescent Siddhartha syndrome, Borgesism as an acute form of labyrinthitis. Those who contract the intellectual’s illness read Bachtin while the whole of Italy watches Sanremo, while those who romanticise their lives too much may have caught Zeno’s disease… First published by Italo Svevo Edizioni in 2016, this sharp divertissement is back in a new revised and expanded version, perfect for those who are capable of not taking themselves too seriously. To be leafed through and read aloud, kept as a talisman and consulted as an oracle – or rather, a package insert.

  • Publishing house Einaudi
  • Year of publication 2025
  • Number of pages 104
  • ISBN 9788806268220
  • Foreign Rights valeria.zito@einaudi.it
  • Ebook disponibile
  • Price 13.50

Rossari, Marco

Marco Rossari has published the novels Nel cuore della notte (In the Heart of the Night, 2018), L’ombra del vulcano (The Shadow of the Volcano, 2023) and Piccolo dizionario delle malattie letterarie (A Short Dictionary of Literary Diseases, 2025) for Einaudi. He has translated and edited works by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Anthony Burgess, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell and many others. He edited the anthology Racconti da ridere (Einaudi 2017).

Piccolo dizionario delle malattie letterarie
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