Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels

Italo Calvino once remarked that in Giorgio Manganelli, "Italian literature has a writer who resembles no one else, unmistakable in each of his phrases, an inventor who is irresistible and inexhaustible in his games with language and ideas." Nowhere is this more true than in this Decameron of fictions, each composed on a single folio sheet of typing paper. Yet, what are they? Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions, existential oxymorons, or wondrous, baleful absurdities? Always provocative, insolent, sinister, and quite often funny, these 100 comic novels are populated by decidedly ordinary lovers, martyrs, killers, thieves, maniacs, emperors, bandits, sleepers, architects, hunters, prisoners, writers, hallucinations, ghosts, spheres, dragons, Doppelgngers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each "novel" construes itself into a kind of Mbius strip, in which, as one crit

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: McPherson
Published: 12/06/2004
ISBN: 9780929701721
Pages: 214
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 8.68h x 5.98w x 0.85d
Award: IndieFab awards - Second Place

Review Citations: Library Journal 02/01/2005 pg. 73