Stefano Benni

312 pages : 23 cm

"A master of political satire infused with a dose of the fantastical."--World Literature TodayB Stefano Benni's enormously popular and distinctive mix of the absurd and the satirical has made him one of Italy's most important and best-loved novelists. This is his twelfth best-selling book of fiction. Fifteen-year-old Margherita lives with her eccentric family on the outskirts of town, a semi-urban wilderness peopled by gypsies, illegal immigrants, and no end of bizarre characters: a reassuring and fertile playground for an imaginative little girl like Margherita. But one day, a gigantic, black cube shows up next door. Her new neighbors have arrived, and they're destined to ruin everything.

"One late-winter morning as he is "hop-hiking" downhill toward his character-building destination, a vomit-yellow cube surrounded by a garden of barbarously unkempt weeds known as the Bisacconi elementary school, Stefano Benni's young hero encounters a peculiar man - as big as a mountain and as filthy as a garbage dump, with a vast beard the color of a dung-heap, dressed from head to foot in layers and rags, and in the company of a swarm of buzzing flies. A god, perhaps? A pagan divinity? Who can tell! After a brief tete-a-tete, this earthy apparition endows the young boy with a rare gift: an internal "duoclock" that allows him to see into the future and at the same time exist in the present with an uncommon fullness. Meet Timeskipper." "Timeskipper sees and foresees the epochal events of his era, from postwar reconstruction to the birth of television - from the golden age of rock'n'roll to the revolutionary sixties and the turbulent seventies. These events are tenderly offset by his own private experiences: his first love, his first job, leaving home, hilariously wild adventures with oddball acquaintances." "A moving and inventive satiric tale in which imagination defies corruption and conformity, in which the innocence of yesteryear comes face-to-face with the moral aridity of today's money-obsessed society, Timeskipper is one of Stefano Benni's most touching and enduring creations. Colored by Benni's trademark linguistic inventiveness and irresistible humor, this is a coming-of-age story with a difference."--book jacket.

"Salgado's stunning photographs of Brazil's landless rural population (estimated at nearly five million) includes an impassioned and biting preface by Saramago, three poems by Chico Buarque, and extensive captions. Ably translated. A beautiful and disturbing book"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

"Contiene todas las obras teatrales de la autora, la mayoría escritas cuando todavía era una adolescente. Los temas se relacionan con esta etapa de vida. En ellas se observan rasgos del existencialismo y la estética absurdista. La más lograda de las obras antalogadas es El mar, una libre adaptación de El cuidador de Harold Pinter"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.