2024
Since 1995, Besa publishing house has been focusing primarily on literary issues that have always been neglected by mainstream publishing circles: the Balkans’ anguish, the multiethnic melting pot of the Mediterranean, the transnational radiance of the Hispanic world from Europe to the Americas.
Series: Passage 221
ISBN: 978-88-3629-227-1
Pages: 192
Cover price: € 15,00
Copyright: 2021
Many know the story of the barbaric assassination of Leon Trotsky at the hands of Ramón Mercader del Río, a naturalized Spanish Soviet secret agent operating in the NKVD during the government of Joseph Stalin in the USSR. However, just a few know that, in order to get as close as possible to the house of Trotsky,( exiled in Mexico), and to attack and killhim, Ramòn Mercader had to infiltrate the life of a woman who was very close to him; this woman, an American Jew and Trotskyist activist, was Trotsky’s secretary and translator. Mercader, some years before, pretended to fall madly in love with her in order to complete his murderous mission. So far, many have focused on the complex identity and events related to Mercader and many have written about him (including Padura and Pacucci) and films have been produced, but no one to date has ever given voice to the beautiful character of Sylvia Ageloff, victim of a diabolical plot and exploited until the end by her lover-spy and then abandoned to her own fate. She was also a prey of the insatiable hunger for information on the part of the journalists who pounced on her story, going so far as to judge her as an ugly woman and also stupid for believing that such a handsome and fascinating man could have really fallen in love with her. The few descriptions that can be found on Sylvia’s
external appearance fall within a typical attitude of body shaming, aimed at denigrating the victim to the point of nullifying all her value. My intent was focused on a precise reconstruction of the facts, given from a different perspective: Sylvia Ageloff’s point of view, who for years, after Trotsky’s assassination in 1940 and the long psychiatric treatments which she underwent, chose to isolate herself from the world and no longer give any interviews about those events.
My novel finally gives voice to her extraordinary and sensitive personality by telling her life, her political commitment, social activism, idealism but also her fragility, desperation, and finally her strength to redeem herself from a destiny manipulated by Stalin as well as from condemnation to the stereotype of a woman incapable of separating reason from feelings. What emerges is a timely and reasoned historical account of all the steps that fueled the history of those years from 1930 onwards. It was not easy to find information on Sylvia, my research was based on sources and documents found in Spanish, French and English which I personally translated, as well as on a series of documentable bibliographic research.
FRANCESCA PALUMBO was born in Bari where she lives and teaches English Language and Literature in high schools. She writes articles and books reviews
for online and local newspapers, she also manage a little school of Autobiographical and creative writing for adults, named INCIPIT.
She has also published the novel Il tempo che ci vuole (Besa Editrice, 2010), which received the “three pens” of Billy, the vice of reading, a well-known TG1 column dedicated to books; the novel Le parole interrotte (ed. Besa 2015), also presented on RAI1 within Billy, she won the Bari Città Aperta National Literary Prize and she was a finalist in the triad of the Society’s National Literary Prize of the Lucca Readers. With Hai avuto la mia vita (Besa Muci, 2021) she won the prize Terre di Puglia.
Trascuranze tells the love story of Julianna, a Polish woman who moves to Mumbai, India, to marry Abad, an Indian muslim. After having lived in London and Dubai, the couple sets in Mumbai, and they have two kids: Adam and Zaira. Adam wants to become a mullah, studying the Quran with his master Yusuf, with whom he will painfully fall in love. Zaira is a rebel daughter, challenging everything her family and the society want to impose on her. Every day Julianna takes care of her father-in-law, Nadir, who is now sick and old: the relationship between them is very moving and powerful. By sharing daily chores, they both start to unravel, no longer family members, but two lost souls dealing with the horror of their pasts – Julianna was
Series: Passage 212
ISBN: 978-88-3629-161-8
Pages: 168
Cover price: € 15,00
Copyright: 2022
raped by her own brother when she was living in London, and Nadir had a passionate affair with Roxendra, the mad lady who undid his heart when he was young and married, unable to choose his destiny. Love is the main character of this novel: love for a man or a woman, love for a city like Mumbai which is maddening and enchanting and ravenous and brave, love for life, love for an ideal, love that in the end goes sour and embodies neglect. Love that can kill. Love that actually kills.
About the author CLARA NUBILE (1974) is a literary translator and a writer. She has published several novels, collections of short stories, poetry collections, essays and articles. Her novel Lupo (2007) has been translated into French.
Luisa Ruggio
“A stunning debut novel”.
Series: Passage 200
ISBN: 978-88-3629-125-0
Pages: 224
Cover price: € 16,00
Copyright: 2020
In the South of Italy, in a land ruled by subversive feelings there is a magical place called Afra. The Second World War is almost over, and there are stories which are witchcrafts and wild desires, woven by five women – five unforgettable characters – who decide to break their long silence. One by one, they confess their love for the same man. This man was once a boy who left for the war, after having played an important role in the lives of these women. Afra is the symbol of Salento, a farm scented by figs and vineyards and fields of golden wheat; a place where the ghosts, the spirits, the dead live close by. These five women, in love with the same man, tell the readers a variation of the same story. Love, uncensored, wild, eternal. These women do not have a name, their identity is defined by the strength of love, an experience which is even more traumatic and deeper than the war itself. There is an illiterate prostitute, grown up in a brothel; a cloistered nun who took the vows to wait for her fiancée who was declared dead during the war; the ghost of a woman haunting the olive orchard, sick with love and longing; a child servant saved from an orphanage who became the lover of her landlord and a teenager from Naples who was able to save herself from the war thanks to her love for the movies.
Love can hurt deeply, more than war or life itself.
The background of these stories - growing on each other like a giant ivy - is a beautiful Southern landscape. It is not only the geography of this novel which is haunting and mesmerizing (the South of Italy and the African desert, the war location of El Alamein) but also the emotional cartography of the characters. A mysterious note, found in a yellowed book, saying «Come back to me, like the blue hour» is the fil rouge linking all these women and these stories. Who wrote that message, and to whom?
The writing of Afra is sumptuous and enchanting: the pages are like woods and cathedrals ringing with gipsy dances and hymns.
The writing is like a female body reclined on a sofa, or dancing naked in the sea. It is a very sensuous writing, able to seduce the readers and transport them to the savage and mystic land of Afra.
Luisa Ruggio’s literary voice is unique in the contemporary panorama of Italian writing. It is a voice which will possess you, will make you mad with desire, you will be wanting more of it.
Afra has echoes of magical realism, the best tradition of Southern American literature, and also a scent of The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.
About the author
LUISA RUGGIO (1978), journalist and writer, lives and works in Apulia. She has published several novels and collections of short stories with Besa: Afra (2006), La nuca (2008), Senza Storie (2010), Un poco di grazia (2014), Teresa Manara (2015), Notturno (2016), Le confidenze (2023).
Series: Passage 269
ISBN: 978-88-497-1202-5
Pages: 296
Cover price: € 17,00
Copyright: 2024
During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt and Stalin agree to divide Italy similarly to Germany. In the North, the Italian Democratic Republic (IDR) is formed under Soviet influence, while the South remains under the rule of the Royal House of Savoy, strongly influenced by both the Church and the United States. The IDR follows a trajectory similar to that of Eastern European states, marked by uprisings and repression until the fall of the Florence Wall in 1989, followed by reunification with the Kingdom in 1991. Meanwhile, the South undergoes rapid Western-style industrial growth, with all the advantages and flaws of capitalism, becoming the most developed state in the Mediterranean. It is against this backdrop that the story of Amedeo Millero unfolds, a stern teacher of history and Marxism-Leninism at his local high school. Now retired, Millero boards a train to Rome in late March 1991. During the journey, he recalls his past, alternating between memories from both recent times and the distant past. In 1945, Millero returns from France to the small town in Piedmont where he was born. There, he reunites with his childhood friend, Silvio Correnti, who has become a prominent leader of the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) during the Liberation War, and he joins Silvio’s group. Millero throws himself into Party activism in the atmosphere of enthusiasm that accompanies the early years of the new regime. However, this political climate is short-lived and quickly turns grim and oppressive. In an atmosphere of suspicion and terror, his former schoolmate , Rosa Denetti, start s a slow but unstoppable rise to local power. Highly skilled and ruthless, she exploits the flaws and distortions of the emerging political system to her advantage. She successfully dismantles Silvio’s group. In 1949 Silvio, marginalised and defeated, organises an armed uprising in which he is killed. Amedeo, narrowly escaping the purge, dedicates himself entirely to teaching, showing an increasingly obsessive loyalty to the regime. This attitude gradually alienates him from his children, Giuseppe and Anna, and his wife Angela, all of whom eventually leave him, until he is left alone to witness the final agonising years of the regime. Immediately after reunification, Rosa Denetti continues her political career, now presenting her self as a Catholic candidate in the elections for the newly unified parliament. It is then that the elderly man begins to search the distant past for something to discredit her. He is assisted in this investigation by Paola Vicari, a young teacher from the South who has taken over his old teaching post. She is the only person who shows any genuine interest in his concerns and, in the end, manages to understand him. Through his relentless investigation, Millero uncovers a compromising document about Rosa Denetti, but his attempt to expose her through the press fails. Millero then makes a decision that will lead to a tragic conclusion. Through the protagonist’s story, the novel presents a fantastical yet plausible alternate history of Italy. It explores the mechanisms that transformed Marxist utopia into real socialism, and the relationship between intellectuals and power in a dictatorial regime.
EDOARDO ANGELINO (Alessandria, 1950) lives in Asti. He taught History and Philosophy at the Scientific High School of his city and currently lectures on Geopolitics at the University of the Three Ages. He made his debut with the novel L’inverno dei mongoli, for Einaudi, thanks to which he won the 1995 Berto Prize and was among the finalists of the Alassio Prize.
He also published, with Paolo Berta, Un tuffo nella vita (Lindau, 2016) and for Besa Binario morto (1998), winner of the Fedeli Prize as best detective novel of the year.
Series: Passage 261
ISBN:978-88-3629-351-3
Pages: 192
Cover price: € 17,00
Copyright: 2024
August 2006. Giacomo, 22 years old, a soldier in the Israeli army and son of an Italian woman (Francesca) and an Israeli man (Yair) was killed during the “Second Lebanon War”, in the suburbs of Bint Jbeil, in southern Lebanon, just three kilometers away from the border with Israel.
Giacomo was a “boded” soldier, alone. This category of soldiers continued to maintain residence and citizenship of their country of origin, obtaining, thanks to their Jewish origins of at least one of their parents, also Israeli origin, and with it the right to do voluntary military service. In Israel the young man is welcomed and supported by the family of Aviva, his father’s only sister, and particularly by Zeev, his peer cousin. Aviva starts a trip to Italy to personally give the news of the incident to his parents and to accompany them back to Israel. Yair hasn’t set foot in his homeland for 23 years. Aviva has cut all the ties with him since he refused to return for their father’s and then for their mother’s funerals. In this polyphonic fresco there is no main actor: the events - told in the third person narrator - develop simultaneously. The novel takes place over the seven days of the shiv’à, or the week of mourning according to the Jewish tradition, and is told through the experiences of Francesca (the mother), Aviva (the aunt) and Zeev (the cousin).
A range of events and characters from the past and the present revolve around all the family members, who are “sitting” in the living room of the paternal grandparents’ apartment, as if on the stage during a theatrical performance. In this novel the lives and vicissitudes of five main characters are intertwined: Giacomo’s death undermines the lives of his parents, aunt, uncle and cousin; the story that is narrated is a journey inside an experience, into the past of every one of the protagonists and towards their new awareness. The return, in a symphony of meanings, is the unifying axis of the novel: the return to Israel, or the return to distance from Israel, the return to an abandoned affection or return to one’s solitude, the return as a destiny or as redemption and repair, the return towards the unconscious or the return to a greater lucidity and self-control, possible returns or impossible returns, the return as in going back or the return as in leaving the present behind...
The lives of the protagonists will be overturned to the foundations with the arrival of the answers to the questions that have been buried and kept quiet for too many years, such as: why the separation of Francesca and Yair, just one year after Giacomo’s birth? Why did Yair suddenly leave Israel, without returning for 23 years not even for his parents’ funerals? Why did Yair abandon the medical profession and why his seemingly rambling lifestyle? What is the connection between First (1982) and Second (2006) Lebanon Wars?
In the days of mourning all of the protagonists will find themselves dealing with their own lives. At the end of the shiv’a` their lives will no longer be the same.
YIGAL LEYKIN, born in Lviv (USSR), at the age of 9 moved with his parents to Poland and from there at 12 to Israel. In 1978 he graduated from the University of Bologna in Medicine and Surgery and then specialized in Anesthesia, Resuscitation and Pain Therapy. He was a contract professor at the University of Trieste and at the “Campus BioMedico” University of Rome. He was also Visiting Professor at Stanford University (USA). He currently practices as a freelancer at the San Giovanni e Paolo Hospital in Venice. He is author of more than 180 scientific papers, published in the most prestigious international journals. For over 10 years he collaborates with the PordenoneLegge book festival. In March 2015 he published with the Giuntina Publishing House his debut novel, Una vita qualunque (Livia Dumontet Prize, winner of the ADEI WIZO prize, second place out of seven finalists of the Chianti prize). He published in 2021 his second novel Il Concerto with the publisher Besa Muci (second place in the XXIII edition of the ADEI WIZZO Award).
Series: Nadir 96
ISBN: 978-88-497-1160-8
Pages: 184
Cover price: € 16,00
Copyright: 2018
Daniel is a teenager living in London. He has never known his father and, after his mother’s death, he was placed with an inept and absent uncle. Victimized by various episodes of bullying, he soon falls into the trap of a supposed ‘savior’ who drags him into a sordid world filled with paid sexual encounters with sleazy adults and spoiled rich kids. Daniel thus becomes an erotic toy, using the knowledge he has gained from adult videos available online. Drawn into a dimension of total emptiness and pure carnality, he begins to express his discomfort by writing on a blog and trying to reconnect with an old friend his mother had known when she was young, with whom she had formed a band. Fran is a woman in her fifties living in New York. She has been widowed for a few years, has no children, and runs a large record label. She is a successful, vibrant, and dynamic woman. One day, she receives a friend request on Facebook from a London teenager and, through the social media platform and the photos posted on the boy’s page, discovers that he is the son of her dear friend Chelsea, with whom she
shared music, passions, and life in London many years ago. Over time, she has lost all trace of Chelsea but carries a sense of guilt for leaving America at a very critical moment for her friend, a moment when Fran could have helped if she hadn’t left.
Fran decides to accept Daniel’s friend request on Facebook, and from this point, the entire novel unfolds in a series of back-and-forths between Fran’s memories of her friendship with Chelsea in the dazzling London of the 1980s, her current life in New York, the chats and Skype sessions between her and the boy, and Daniel’s confessions that gradually bring out the terrible reality and the desire to react. Fran will prove to be wonderfully decisive and capable of intervening with balance and intelligence in Daniel’s life, despite the distance, not only geographical but also generational. And all this will also happen thanks to music, a common thread that runs through every page of La pelle che non c’è.
FRANCESCA PALUMBO was born in Bari where she lives and teaches English Language and Literature in high schools. She writes articles and books reviews for online and local newspapers, she also manage a little school of Autobiographical and creative writing for adults, named INCIPIT.
She has published: an anthology of short stories entitled Volevo dirtelo (2008); the novel Il tempo che ci vuole (Besa Editrice, 2010), which received the maximum recognition of the “three pens” of Billy, the vice of reading, a well-known TG1 column dedicated to books; the instant book entitled La vita è un colpo secco (ed. Atmosphere, 2014) and the graphic novel In Fondo (ed. Fasi di Luna, 2014). With her penultimate novel Le parole interrotte (ed. Besa 2015), also presented on RAI1 within Billy, she won the Bari Città Aperta National Literary Prize and she was a finalist in the triad of the Society’s National Literary Prize of the Lucca Readers. She has also written and edited the anthology Labili confines, poems of migration, travel and exile (2018) and she personally translated many of the poems she selected and collected within it. With Hai avuto la mia vita (Besa Muci, 2021) she won the prize Terre di Puglia.
19
Marcello Kalowski
Series: Nadir 128
ISBN: 978-88-3629-231-8
Pages: 224
Cover price: € 16,00
Copyright: 2022
Tariq is a young, unconscious homosexual. Unconscious because, due to his young age and innocence, he is free from the direct and undirect, explicit and implicit conditioning that burdens those who live with the awareness that their “difference” will not be accepted, or will only be accepted with great difficulty. Tariq, instead, simply follows his nature, his love for beauty. He tries to grasp a life full of colors that he never suspected could exist, a life completely different from the gray and sad one he had known in his few years and which he thought had no alternatives.
Tariq comes from a land where homosexuality is considered a moral corruption, a degeneration of the soul, rendering those affected by it an ‘aib, an abject being, an abomination that can only redeem itself and regain paradise through martyrdom. Only escape can save Tariq; escape from his world, where the heat of the sun melts everything that is not misery, resentment and war, and where life is merely the fuel for a rage that leaves the soul dry and hardened, cracked like the earth. Tariq flees, certain that he will find a world, ours, happy, thriving and full of colors. However,
he will soon discover that our world too can be dry and gray, no less than the land he escaped from.
“And tell me Tariq, what was more tearing for you? To be one of the many indistinguishable lives uprooted by war and hunger or, whether there’s war or not, here as well as there, to be Tariq the ‘aib? And what is the sum?”
MARCELLO KALOWSKI was Born in Rome in 1954, son of an Italian mother and of a Polish Jewish father who had survived the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. He has worked for the Hebrew Immigration Aid Service, an American-jewish organization that provides humanitarian aid to refugees.
The author has published four books: Il Silenzio di Abram. Mio padre dopo Auschwitz (Laterza, 2015); La Scuola dei giusti nascosti (BesaMuci 2022); Tariq l’obbrobrio (Besa-Muci 2022); Ebrei alla deriva. Uno Shtetl nella giungla (Edizioni Ester, 2023).
Series: Riflessi 99
ISBN: 978-88-3629-134-2
Pages: 304
Cover price: € 17,00
Copyright: 2023
In contemporary world, sport has become an all-encompassing phenomenon, gaining political, economic, social, and cultural dimension. The present book describes the social and political relevance of football in the Balkans. From the struggle against foreign rule in the late Habsburg Empire, until the birth of the workers’ movement during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, athletic clubs represented a framework to conduct propaganda and promote a sense of belonging to ethnic or political communities. A relevant number of Yugoslav athletes joined the partisan resistance against fascist occupation and during Tito’s Yugoslavia, football was instrumental in conveying the socialist principle of brotherhood and unity.
In the 80s, the emergence of modern ultras transformed football matches into a terrain of confrontation among urban hooligans, while nationalist actors, eager to exploit the stadiums’ social potential, found in the terraces a fertile ground for the proliferation of ethnic intolerance. Fans thus joined the ranks of emerging nationalist movements and later volunteered in the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. However, relations between
supporters and the newly established national Governments quickly deteriorated.
In the second half of the 90s, ultras regularly expressed vocal opposition against the ruling elite, undermining the prestige and consensus of both Croatia’s Tudjman and Serbia’s Milosevic. The present book allows the reader to understand, through the prism of football, the complex realities of Balkan societies, underlining issues that played a significant role in the inner political debate, but received lesser attention abroad. Taking into account a variety of sources that include archive documents, newspaper articles, and eyewitness accounts, the author describes the sociocultural dimension of different clubs, from Dinamo Zagreb, to Red Star Belgrade, until the Bosnian cauldron, where ethnic tensions and loyalties resurface through supporters’ behavior and clubs’ banners.
The different chapters explain political maneuvers evolving around stadiums and popular culture in general, as proved by the case of Arkan, an underworld leader who took advantage of football fandom to cover up the criminal dimension of his activities. Described in detail are the hooligans’ role in spreading nationalism, their struggle against LGBT rights, as well as their participation in political disputes as a storming force ready to be mobilized by opposing parties. This essay represents a unique tool to understand the sociopolitical dynamics of modern-day Balkans, a region where wars are over, yet ethnic nationalism remains the primary ideological reference and ritual conflicts are still waged against real or alleged enemies. It is precisely in this framework that sport maintained a relevant sociopolitical capital.
GIORDANO MERLICCO, PhD, has taught in several universities in Italy and abroad, from Rome to Algeria, from Myanmar to Tunisia, from the Balkans, to Wuhan, in China. He wrote policy papers for the Research Unit of the Italian Parliament and is author of several publications about history and international relations, mostly on the Balkans.
Series: Riflessi 103
ISBN: 978-88-3629-384-1
Pages: 128
Cover price: € 16,00
Copyright: 2024
Kárhozat is an Hungarian word whose meaning can be translated as “perdition, damnation”. The book collects Christian Eccher’s geopoetic reportages from Ukraine at war and from neighboring European countries, also threatened by conflicts: Moldova, Hungary, Belarus, Transnistria, as well as the Kosovo of the dramatic days of 2020 and Armenia with the Russians who emigrated to escape the call to arms. The book opens with a reportage from Southern Ukraine written a few months before the outbreak of the conflict which demonstrates how the war changed the face of the country in a very short time. Traveling to Bessarabia and Odessa, Eccher provides us with a picture of a Ukraine that the media ignores.
CHRISTIAN ECCHER was born in Basel in 1977. With a solid degree in Italian Literature from “La Sapienza”, a student of masters of the caliber of Pedrag Matvejević and Tullio De Mauro, he is a professor of Italian language and culture at the University of Novi Sad, in Serbia. He has the vocation and the vaguely spirited but acute gaze of the explorer of complex, intertwined, mixed, borderline, peripheral, often neurotic worlds, of which he offers us a reading against the grain, escaping any schematism or prejudice.
