It is now official: Wu Ming 1 will translate the next Stephen King book into Italian. It is a collection of four novellas entitled Full Dark, No Stars.

Wu Ming 1 is one of the Constant Readers, a long-time Stephen King fan. For years, he’s been reviewing King’s books and writing about his work on newspapers and magazines.

A few days ago, WM1 wrote an open letter to the Italian King fandom, announcing the news and explaining a few things about his method. Here’s a translated excerpt:

I’m fully aware that, like a salmon, I’ll have to swim against a stream of mistrust (if not hostility), which is perfectly understandable. For many years, the Italian “voice” of King was that of Tullio Dobner. Dobner is a skilled translator and his undertakings are nothing short of epic, as he toiled and lost blood on King’s enormous tomes. He is also a generous person who often confronted the fan community in “no holds barred” discussions. It is normal that this new “experiment” raises eyebrows. In fact, I see talk of protests, petitions etc.

Here’s what I have to say: judge me by the result. (more…)

Q and Altai both acquired by Tokyio-based Sogensha Co., Ltd.

In April 2008 Wu Ming 1 – on behalf of the whole collective – published the so-called “memorandum” on the New Italian Epic, which since then has been rippling the surface of Italian culture. The debate is still hot, attacks on our vision are constantly delivered by powerful senior critics and windbags, but we also opened several breaches: since 2008, no discussion of the current state of Italian literature has been possible without references – either positive or negative – to what we wrote. They just couldn’t ignore the “memorandum” (and the expanded version that was published as a book by Einaudi in 2009).

Not surprisingly, the first monography on the subject wasn’t published in Italy but in the UK. It is entitled Overcoming Postmodernism: The Debate on New Italian Epic, and it’s a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies (Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2010). We reproduce the Editor’s introduction and the Notes on Contributors.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Claudia Boscolo

Aims and origin
The contributors of this special issue of Journal of Romance Studies all offer a critical view of a single text. They all engage with different novels as primary material, but their analysis is based on Italian author Wu Ming 1’s essay New Italian Epic: Memorandum 1993-2008, the first version of which was published online in April 2008. Wu Ming is the name of a collective of Italian authors based in Bologna, formerly known as the Luther Blissett Project [1] The collective is currently formed by four members, known by a number from 1 to 5 (Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, Wu Ming 4 and Wu Ming 5 – Wu Ming 3 left the group in 2008). New Italian Epic is commonly known as the ‘Memorandum’ [2]. It describes and provides a taxonomy for a corpus of Italian contemporary novels by various authors – including Wu Ming. (more…)