Tag: Italy

Adventures in Language School

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Joseph Di Prisco is the author of several books, including novels—the most recent of which is All for Now (MacAdam/Cage)—and two poetry collections. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and The Threepenny Review, and his poetry was published in the Winter 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA.

Two new poems by Di Prisco appear in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer issue: “Symptomatology” and “Adventures in Language School.” Here we present the latter, which is characteristic of the humor and the warmth that imbues Di Prisco’s charming poetry.

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Blinded to His Ugliness: Francesco Pacifico’s ‘The Story of My Purity’

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Unreliable narrators have populated literary works for hundreds of years. Piero Rosini, the narrator of Francesco Pacifico’s novel The Story of My Purity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 292 pages; translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley) is not unreliable in a naïve or precocious way like Huck Finn, but utterly loathsome in the vein of Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert. Rosini is a devout Catholic working as an editor in a right-wing publishing house in Rome. His current project is a book that would expose Pope John Paul II as having been born Jewish and planted in the Catholic Church by Frankists. […]

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