The Street Kids - Softcover

Pasolini, Pier Paolo

3.62

4,825 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609453085 ISBN 13: 9781609453084

Publisher: Europa Editions, 2016

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A groundbreaking contemporary classic.

The Street Kids is arguably the most important novel by Italy's preeminent 20th century author, film director and political thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini. First published in 1955, it caused such public outrage that Pasolini was charged with obscenity. Although he was acquitted at trial, the novel was lambasted by critics and readers alike, until its undeniable force led to it being universally acknowledged as a masterpiece. Set in Rome during the post-war years, the Rome of the 'borgate', outlying neighbourhoods beset by poverty and deprivation, it tells the story of a group of adolescents belonging to the urban underclass. Riccetto and his friends live day by day and hand-to-mouth, of odd jobs, petty crime and prostitution, their hunger growing as Italy begins to enjoy a period of economic growth and unprecedented change, until their needs too change beyond recognition. Rooted in the neorealist movement of the 1950s, The Street Kids is a tender, heart-rending tribute to an entire underclass in danger of being forgotten.

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Review:

"Goldstein's translation works best when Pasolini is at his simplest, with beautiful descriptions of the city by day and night." --The Guardian

Praise for Pier Paolo Pasolini
"A brilliant intellectual, a director, and a homosexual, whose political vision based on a singular entwinement of Eros, Catholicism, and Marxism - foresaw Italian history after his death, and the burgeoning of global consumerism" -- Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian

"Pasolini is Italy's most important twentieth century poet." -- Alberto Moravia

"Pasolini was an artist and thinker who tried not to resolve his contradictions but rather to embody them fully." -- Dennis Lim, The New York Times

About the Author:

Born in 1922, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a film director, poet, writer and political thinker. Throughout his life he exhibited extraordinary cultural versatility and became a highly controversial figure. While his work remains contentious, since his tragic death in 1975, Pasolini has come to be seen as a visionary thinker and a major figure in Italian literature and art. His Poems were included by Harold Bloom in his bestselling work of literary criticism The Western Canon.
Translator Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. Her translations for Europa Editions include novels by Amara Lakhous, Alessandro Piperno, and Elena Ferrante. She is currently editing the complete works of Primo Levi, for which she received a Guggenheim Translation fellowship. She lives in New York.

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