The Twenty Days of Turin: A Novel - Hardcover

Giorgio De Maria; Ramon Glazov

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1631492292 ISBN 13: 9781631492297

Publisher: Liveright, 2017

Synopsis

"Remarkably prescient... No Gibson, no Sterling, no cyberpunk or spec-fic scribbler of the '80s or '90s ever captured the poisoned zeitgeist of social media better than this... It was a book written for a different world. And the most disturbing thing about it is how appropriate it is for ours." NPR

In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another's personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library's users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity.

As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. Inevitably drawn into the city's occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what's shared can never be unshared. An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years.

Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria's vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet-and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing-this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever. Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria's place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Hauntingly imaginative, with visceral prose that chills to the marrow, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus, long overdue but ever timely.

About this title

Review:

"Given the rise of social media and the almost obsessive need of individuals today to share anything and everything about their lives, the themes of The Twenty Days Of Turin are more prescient now than ever before." --This is Horror

Almost forgotten to the ash heap of collective literary amnesia, Giorgio De Maria's masterpiece oozes with unsettling creepiness and despair as strange gods play out their violent fantasies in an Italy gone quietly insane. This one will slip its way into your darkest dreams. --Christian Kiefer, author of The Animals

""The Twenty Days of Turin" is always, in its brief course, odder and stubborner than you expect it to be, defiantly resistant to interpretation." --The New York Times

About the Author:

Giorgio de Maria (1924-2009) was a pianist, critic, playwright, and novelist. He wrote four novels, the best remembered of which is The Twenty Days of Turin. Ramon Glazov has contributed to many US and Australian publications, including Jacobin and Tincture Journal. He splits his time between Perth and Turin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1631492292
• ISBN 13: 9781631492297
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224