Since last April, we have published 37 articles on Giap, our blog in Italian. Most of them are lengthy stuff. They often generated several hundreds of comments, and debates that went on for weeks. A discussion on Italy, financial capital, the ever-agonizing Burlesquoni government and the current economic crisis is still in full swing after more than a month.
We wrote pieces – or gave talks which were recorded and put on the blog for download – on the recent uprisings all over Europe and the Mediterranean, with particular focus on the Spanish “Indignados”.
We talked about riots, workers’ struggles in Italy and the amazing “No TAV” movement in Piedmont, North-Western Italy (which we regard as one of the most advanced experiences of self-organisation and grassroots resistance to capitalism).
We commented upon the 10th anniversary of the G8 summit in Genoa, the murder of Carlo Giuliani etc. (more…)

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ePUB, 4.7 mb
[Mind you, we used Calibre to convert from pdf to ePUB, and the result is CRAP. As we're just middle-age men of humanities, this is the most we can do at the moment. If you choose the latter format, you'll have to improve the layout yourself.]

Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Published by Verso Books
[They've got quite a cool website, by the way]

About Manituana

Download is completely gratis et amore dei. However, if you want to make a donation to support our work, please click the button below.

And if you decided to buy the book all the same, that would obviously be really fucking, uh, great.
Amazon UK – Amazon USA

Click to see the whole cover (PDF)

REVIEWS:
The Guardian
The Independent
Le Monde
CounterPunch
Bookslut

FEATURE ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS:
A Life in Writing: Wu Ming (The Guardian)
The Struggle Continues (The Glasgow Herald)
‘We Get More Ambitious’: An Interview with Wu Ming (Social Text)

Q: What do Wu Ming have in common with Ron Jacobs?
A: The Weather Underground.
Q: What?
Well, Jacobs is the author of this history of the Weather Underground, just republished by Verso.
We authored an intro/blurb for the Italian edition of this documentary on the Weather Underground.
Now Jacobs reviews Manituana on CounterPunch and describes the book as “a novel of the fourth world”.
Here’s an excerpt from his article:

[Manituana] pits the original peoples of a nation against those who come to colonize it.  It is the story of the multiple indigenous nations that existed on the American continent before the Europeans came and destroyed them.  It is the story of India and the British Raj and it is the tale of the Algerian people and the French Republic’s colonization of that land.  it is also the story of Israel and its ethnic transformation of Palestine into a Western settler state.  In short, it is the tale of every people that has seen its land taken over by a European people as intent on making it their own as its original inhabitant are on preventing such an occurrence.  This is also the story of America’s indigenous people being manipulated by the European colonists for the Europeans’ own ends.  We see a mirror of this situation in today’s manipulations of the indigenous peoples in the lands the west wants as its own today: the Shia vs. Sunni conflict in Iraq and the manipulation of tribal conflicts  in Afghanistan are but two examples that come immediately to mind.  Manituana evokes the dangerous conceit of men who believe it is their destiny to rule the world.

By the way, Manituana is in bookshops today!

Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Given that our previous novels hadn’t encountered much critical acclaim in the US (mainstream) press, during the work on Manituana we sometimes wondered what American reviewers would think and write about the book. S’incazzeranno di brutto, was the most frequent answer – “They’ll get mad”. How dare these Italian *§#!>:-/%s tell us our own story? Just mind your own business, will ya?
[Of course, any sentient being in the world could easily reply: hey, that's also our business. American capitalism and American weapons mingled with everyone else's history long ago (*). And what if Sergio Leone - another Italian *§#!>:-/% - hadn't minded precisely this business? We would never have gotten some of the finest western movies ever made. We'd never have gotten Once Upon a Time in the West.]
That was the worst (or best?) case scenario, none of us expected things to be so simple. In fact, now we’ve got two American (pre-)reviews, and things aren’t so simple. :-) (more…)

On 26 september 2009, Wu Ming 2 will be in GENEVA, Switzerland, at a literary festival called Fureur de lire [more or less: "Frenzy to read"]. The talk is entitled Fureur à l’italienne [more or less: "Fury the Italian Way"] and scheduled for 1 PM @ MC Plainpalais, Théâtre Pitoëff. WM1 and Serge Quadruppani (an excellent novelist and the French translator of our books) will present  Manituana (French edition, Editions Métailié) and discuss the latest wave of Italian literature, with particular references to the so-called  New Italian Epic. Here’s  Fureur de lire‘s official website.

On 15 October 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 will be in LONDON, UK. They will present Manituana (UK/US edition, Verso Books) at Borders bookstore, 122 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0JR.

On 16 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in TREMBLAY-EN-FRANCE, France, to present Manituana. Details to follow.

On 16 October 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 will still be in LONDON, UK. They will present Manituana (UK/US edition, Verso Books) at Big Green Bookshop, Unit 1, Brampton Park Road, Wood Green, London N22 6BG. 7 PM.

On 17 October 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 will still be in LONDON, UK. They will present Manituana (UK/US edition, Verso Books) at the  Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH. We’re pleased to announce that the British novelist  Stewart Home will read pages from our book. With the participation of Shaun Whiteside (the translator into English of all our books). 9 PM

On the very same day, 17 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in LIMOGES, France. They will present Manituana at the  Bibliothèque Francophone Multimédia (BFM), Centre-ville, 2 Place Aimé Cèsaire, Limoges Cedex. 3 PM.

On 18 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in TARNAC, France, to present Manituana at the Café-épicerie. Details to follow.

On 20 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in PARIS, France, to present Manituana at La Libreria (89 rue du Fbg Poissonnière, Paris 9e). More details to follow.

On 21 October 2009, Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 5 will be in LILLE, France, to present Manituana at the Librairie internationale V.O. 36 rue de Tournai, 59000 Lille. More details to follow.

On 18 November 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 5 will be in NEW YORK CITY. They will present Manituana at the New School, Room 510, 66 West 12th Street, 8 PM.

On 20 November 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 5 will be in NEW YORK CITY. They will present Manituana at Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, (Lower East Side, between Stanton and Rivington). 7 PM.

On 23 November 2009, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 5 will be in NEW YORK CITY. They will present Manituana (and read from the book in their thick Italian accent) at PS122, 150 First Avenue (corner of East 9th Street) Directions: L train to 1st Avenue,
 F/V train to 2nd Avenue, 
N/R to 8th Street, 
6 to Astor Place. $6.

Stewart Home

[That old fellow traveller of ours, the novelist and cultural terrorist Stewart Home, blogged a few interesting things about Manituana, which we duly reproduce. He also reviewed Q some time ago.]

Manituana by Wu Ming

Following on from Q (authored as Luther Blissett) and 54, comes a new novel Manituana by the Bologna fiction collective known as Wu Ming. Verso are publishing Shaun Whiteside’s English translation, the proof copies were circulated last month, and the book will be available in both the UK and the US shortly. Like the earlier tomes by the same authors, Manituana is a heavily researched historical novel that speaks as much about a future we have yet to make, as the past in which it is set. The main action takes place around the ‘American War of Independence’, with the focus on the alliance the Iroquois Indians made with the English.

The Iroquois way of life was destroyed by the development of capitalism, and this entailed the exploitation of both Africa and the Americas, as well as the European working class. The diseases that accompanied European traders and their goods decimated the indigenous American population and thereby opened the way for their conquest. The Iroquois were caught between a rock and a hard place and mostly chose to ally with ‘perfidious Albion’, rather than the equally barbarous French or – slightly later – the genocidal armies of George Washington. However, for me the real ‘heroes’ of this novel are not the characters who take up the bulk of its pages (some are  actual historical figures), but rather those shadowy proletarian figures who attempt to make an alliance with the Iroquois when some of their leaders visit London.  From page 199 of Marituana: (more…)