Writers Speak Research Articles

On Being Had: Publishing an Article on a Literary Fake

In 2002, I published an article in Theatre Research International called ‘Heiner Müller as the End of Brechtian Dramaturgy: Müller on Brecht in Two Lesser-Known Fragments’. I had written my doctoral dissertation on Müller, and, in the course of my studies, had come across two shorter pieces that, to my knowledge, had not been discussed by scholars. The first was Philoktet 1979 (Philoctetes 1979), a short, parodic and grotesque treatment of the Philoctetes myth, something very different from Müller's more sombre adaptation of the same material, published in 1965. I had heard Müller read the comic piece at the Berliner Ensemble in March 1995 and located the source in a copy of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, printed in December 1978. The second piece was also parodic and also appeared in a newspaper. Nachleben Brechts Beischlaf Auferstehung in Berlin (Brecht's Afterlife Intercourse Resurrection in Berlin) featured in the Volkszeitung in July 1990.1 The title suggested that Müller was ironically quoting his own back catalogue, echoing his play Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (Gundling's Life Frederick of Prussia Lessings Sleep Dream Cry) (1977) and Germania Tod in Berlin (Germania Death in Berlin) (1978). Stylistically, it looked like a heightened version of the technique employed in Philoktet 1979, in that it drew on and collided more Brechtian intertexts, and referenced Müller's own work more extensively. My doctoral supervisor had found the short playlet in the Volkszeitung. It was one of five responses to Brecht from prominent German literary figures, including Peter Handke and Martin Walser, collected under the title ‘Brecht: Stimmen der Dichter’ (Brecht: The Writers Speak). In my article's fifth footnote, I observed that while Philoktet 1979 appeared in the only extant bibliography of the playwright at the time, Nachleben Brechts did not. It would be hard to conceal an amount of smugness in my observation. But such self-satisfaction is not a quality worth airing too publicly, as will become evident soon.

Spirit and Word: Dual Testimony in John, Paul and Luke

Spirit and Word: Dual Testimony in John, Paul and Luke

Cultural Responses to Urban Violence in 21st Century Brazil: New Writers Speak from the Margins

Cultural Responses to Urban Violence in 21st Century Brazil:New Writers Speak from the Margins Leonora Paula Discussions concerning contemporary Latin America often focus on old and new forms of organizing and controlling marginalized groups in the massive urban spaces continuously spreading across the territory. The fear of violence, the emergence of middle and upper-class essentially self-sufficient fortified citadels, the expansion of violent criminality, and the continuous infringement of citizenship rights – ironically within a context of recent re-democratization – all contribute to the representation of an experience of the city as inherently violent. While the dominant discourse of violence and fear of violence is outlined by the reinforcement of excessive use of force against socially and racially marginalized populations, its superimposition on the social cartography of the city does not suppress the existence of forms of mobilization that resist such segregationist program. Amidst the many manifestations that embody this contesting attitude in contemporary Latin American urban culture, a number of literary productions partake in the critical intervention of portraying the urban experience by representing the particularities of socio-cultural realities and problematizing the ways in which urban violence is represented. In that regard, these new cultural productions offer provocative discussions that complicate the debate about violence and representation. In this essay, I discuss how the works produced by authors identified with the twenty-first century literary movement known as Literatura Periférica respond to and intervene in the representation and reproduction of urban violence in Brazil by putting forward a new imaginary for the symbolic and material space occupied by a socially excluded and racialized marginality. Having lived in these spaces themselves, these authors have been writing about life on the margins while centering their works on traditionally excluded groups such as the urban poor. Different from works that celebrate an oversimplified culture of violence, such as the notorious [End Page 67] film phenomenon Cidade de Deus (2002), periphery literature renders visible a different frame of reference regarding Brazil's most impoverished spaces, one that is concerned with representing the dire experiences of racial discrimination, social inequality, and spatial segregation associated with being poor in contemporary urban Brazil. This is because Literatura Periférica promotes a social vision of the world from within in which the periphery is understood and represented not as an inherently crime-ridden and culturally impoverished space, but as a legitimate site of enunciation for representing lived experiences. While the almost ubiquitous presence of everyday violence is by no means excluded from these works, the dominant discourse of violence that equates peripheries to spaces of crime is challenged for its overtly discriminatory bias. Conversely, Literatura Periférica's most powerful critique of violence lies in disrupting a model of cultural production that has historically excluded the marginalized by intervening with their own production of culture and affirming the periphery as a dynamic cultural space. As a cultural response to different forms of violence, Literatura Periférica reveals that, even though not recognized by society as a cultural product typical of the periphery, the literature produced in that space is a legitimate form of cultural expression that generates discursive and material spaces for negotiating between Brazil's social realities and its representations. My research and analysis are carried out against the backdrop of the cultural landscape of São Paulo, whose vast peripheries bear the largest, most prolific, and most visible production of Literatura Periférica. In the context of Brazilian cities, especially São Paulo, periferia (periphery) is a term used to identify vast areas of habitation and settlement outside the central zones of the city, which have been historically occupied by low-income and non-white populations. Formed in the late 19th century, the first settlements were home to freed slaves and low-income workers with no land ownership, and with only meager job opportunities. In the early decades of the 20th century, while Brazil promoted massive European immigration to whiten the nation and to fulfill the demands of its incipient industrial development, São Paulo grew rapidly without a matched commensurate urban planning. By mid-century, rural migrants attracted by the city's wealth settled in the peripheries...

The Enlightenment of Zen Buddhism and the Hesychastic Vision of the Divine Light

My intention here is to present the religious phenomena of Zen and Hesychasm, analyzing similarities within the mechanism of prayer and movements within the respective faiths. There is a common way that the transcendent is exposed in Zen Buddhism and Hesychasm, but at the same time there is conflict between traditional Eastern Christian ideas on the communion with and the Western approaches to that are manifest in the Eastern and Western understanding of God. The divine in the Christian tradition and enlightenment in the Oriental religions are two different experiences. The common characteristics of the breathing exercises in Hesychasm and Zen make the study of these common religious phenomena interesting. Byzantine monks in the East were free persons and at the same time obedient to traditional authority. The bishops were elected from the monastic community. The Byzantine society respected monks who were completely devoted to and who engaged in unceasing prayer, fasting, and restraint. This unceasing prayer was very important for the monks, who adopted a variety of techniques and theories developed in relation to it. Traditionally, there are two schools of thought on the matter within Christianity: (1) The school of Evagrios of Pontos (Asia Minor), which is based on Platonism, with an epistemological approach to purify the mind and unite with the divine spirit; and (2) the school of Makarios, leading toward Neoplatonism, with an approach of purifying the heart. The monks of the fourteenth century leaned toward the Makarian school of thought. They emphasized that the human being is body, heart, and spirit that participate in the blessed vision of the uncreated and especially in prayer. In this way the whole human being is transformed and deified, a process known as theosis. The purpose of the monks in prayer is literally to attain communion with God. The is a universal symbol of and God's Reign, in contrast to darkness and its misery. The symbol of as was commonly used in Greek philosophy and religious tradition in the mystery religions (enlightenment: as vision of god or goddess); this was also true in Gnosticism, in the heretical sects of Judaism and Christianity. In the Christian creed Jesus Christ is the Son of God, viewed as Light of Light, and the entire Christian theology, ethics, and liturgies are imbued by this symbolism of light. It is true that some Eastern writers speak of in apophatic terms and symbolism. This is true only in a few neoplatonic theologians who speak of in an absolute apophatic way. For them, is beyond, as described in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and others. However, according to the claim of the apophatic way, God is light more than darkness. Especially within the Christian life and theory, it is in the Uncreated light that the symbols of the are manifest in the created world. This is also evident from the Hebrew Bible. This transcendent is manifested in Jesus Christ, through his whole life and teaching, and especially in the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor and his Resurrection. In this light, all the faithful participants in their daily life will participate in the eschaton, in the End of Days. The hesychasts of the Holy Mountain make every effort to attain exactly this type of life. This type of theological language concerning and communion with always had a real and symbolic taste of the transcendent now, as well as the hope for a more complete taste and fulfillment of in the future. The hesychasts introduced an intensive realism and a time of completeness in relation with the divine and filled with God; this fulfillment was realized in their own practice of prayer and in their expectation that during prayer they participate in true uncreated and are therefore transfigured by the of the holy transfiguration. …

The Emergence of the Sixties Generation in Egypt and the Anxiety over Categorization1

Abstract In September 1969 the Egyptian literary journal al-Ṭalīʿah began a feature entitled “Hākadhā yatakallamu al-udabāʾ al-shabāb” (“This Is How the Young Writers Speak”), that sought to understand, analyze, and categorize the emerging literary generation in Egypt. Consisting of a questionnaire that targeted over thirty artists and a series of articles by prominent critics, the feature precipitated fierce debates about the significance of what came to be known as jīl al-sittīnāt—the sixties generation—in Egypt. This article examines the emergence of this generation as documented in the pages of the journals of the time. Here I build upon the work of Elisabeth Kendall and Richard Jacquemond, presenting this feature as an example of what I call the “anxiety over categorization” that dominated literary discussions during this time. These discussions were as much about categorization as they were about the negotiation of power in what Pierre Bourdieu has called “the field of cultural production.” The emergence of a new generation of writers seemed to pose a threat to the established figures in the field, raising questions about whether or not aesthetic innovation was strictly the domain of the young. I read the al-Ṭalīʿah feature against the work of the new writers themselves, as displayed upon the pages of Jālīrī 68. The latter, a short-lived but highly influential avant-garde journal, was created to cater to the literary production of the new generation, and privileged publication of their work over a categorizing discourse. In tracing the generational debates that took place surrounding the emergence of the sixties generation, this anxiety over categorization reveals how power and authority are negotiated in the literary field in Egypt.

Shouts and Whispers: Twenty‐One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith – Edited by Jennifer L. Holdberg

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 37, Issue 3 p. 201-202 Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith – Edited by Jennifer L. Holdberg Darren J. N. Middleton, Darren J. N. Middleton Texas Christian UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Darren J. N. Middleton, Darren J. N. Middleton Texas Christian UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 September 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2011.01533_1.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume37, Issue3September 2011Pages 201-202 RelatedInformation

Unspoiled: Writers Speak for Florida's Coast

Unspoiled: Writers Speak for Florida's Coast

Book Review: Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith, What the Light was Like

Book Review: Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith, What the Light was Like

Searching for Max Havelaar: Multatuli, Colonial History, and the Confusion of Empire

Must everything in modern Dutch literature begin and end with Multatuli?1 So much has been written on Multatuli and his work, and so many different things have been attributed to his influence, that his presence in modern Dutch literary history nearly overwhelms both his contemporaries and those who have followed after. Only a decade or so after his death, Multatuli’s novel on Dutch colonial rule in the Netherlands Indies, Max Havelaar, had become nearly required reading and something like a badge of identification for both radical and mainstream political groups in the Netherlands.2 Gerard Brom, writing in 1931 about the influence of the Indies on Dutch culture, could only wax poetic about Multatuli and his work: “so great was the influence of Max Havelaar for life in the Indies, and so great was its significance for Dutch culture,” that the book’s presence had become “a fact that no writer could hope to avoid.”3 Even Queen Wilhelmina (r. 1898–1948) found inspiration in the writings of Multatuli when she began to entertain the idea of writing the story of her own life as part of the moral and material rebuilding of the Netherlands in the postwar years.4 Other writers speak of Multatuli as the “true Prometheus” of Dutch literature, the observance of whose literary “cult” is nearly a matter of “religious duty” for Dutch literati.5 Multatuli’s influence has indeed been immense, both in Dutch literature and in the literature of empire, but one wonders at times if the stories of the life and work of Multatuli had perhaps taken on a life of their own and become a

Annual Biblography, Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2004

Beginning with this issue, every fall issue of Roth Studies will include a complete bibliography of texts published during the previous calendar year. This list will include primary works by Roth, interviews with Roth, critical works (books, book chapters, and journal essays), book reviews and newspaper profiles, dissertations, and adaptations of Roth's fiction.With the exception of the interview listings, all sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors last name (or in the absence of an author, the primary title). The individual essays that compose an edited collection (as in the case of Blooms book and the special edition of Studies in American Jewish Literature) are included under either Chapters or Articles and Essays with appropriate cross-listed information. Only the original American editions of Roth's works are listed below. Of the book reviews, only substantive pieces appearing in major English-language publications are included. All critical sources not published in English are listed under the section Criticism in Foreign Languages. In the case of reprinted works, all original publication information is listed along with the more current bibliographic information.Works by RothFictionThe Plat Against Boston: Houghton, 2004.NonfictionLindbergh and Jews. Letter. New York Times 5 Mar. 2004, late ed.: A22.The Story behind The Plot Against America. New York Times Book Rev. 19 Sept. 2004: 10+.Reprinted WorksFrom American Pastoral. Labor Days: An Anthology of Fiction about Work. Ed. David Gates. New York: Random, 2004. 123-40.Interviews of RothThe America That Was, and the Past That Wasn't. Interview with John Freeman. San Francisco Chronicle 3 Oct. 2004: M2.Interview with Jeffrey Brown [two-part interview]. News Hour with Jim Lehrer. 27 Oct. 2004 and 10 Nov. 2004. PBS. 12 July 2005 and .Interview with Kurt Anderson. Studio 360. 6 Nov. 2004. WNYC, New York. 12 July 2005 .Interview with Michael Krasny. Forum. 29 Dec. 2004. KQED, San Francisco. 12 July 2005 .Interview with Terry Gross [Originally broadcast 8 May 2000]. Fresh Air: Writers Speak with Terry Gross. Minneapolis: Highbridge, 2004. (Also rpt. in Writers Speak: A Collection of Interviews with Writers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Boston: WHYY, 2004.)Novelist Roth. Interview with Tom Ashbrook. On Point. 3 Dec. 2004. WBUR, Boston. 12 July 2005 .Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Roth. Interview with Terry Gross. Fresh Air. 11 Oct. 2004. Natl. Public Radio. WHYY, Philadelphia. 12 July 2005 . (Transcript of interview, Author Roth Discusses His New Book The Plot Against America. LexisNexis. .)Roth Rewrites History with The Plat Against America. Interview with Robert Siegel. All Things Considered. 23 Sept. 2004. Nad. Public Radio. WNYC, New York. 12 July 2005 . (Transcript of interview, Philip Roth Discusses His Novel The Plot Against America. LexisNexis. .)Books and Special Journal IssuesBloom, Harold, ed. Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. New York: Chelsea, 2004.Royal, Derek Parker, ed. Roth's America: The Later Novels. Spec, issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature 23 (2004): 1-181.Shostak, Debra. Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. …

Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States

Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States Otto H. Olsen In a recent brief and thoughtful volume, David Brion Davis has directed attention to what he calls a "paranoid style" affecting the antebellum debate over slavery in the United States.1 Encouraged by insecurities as well as convictions, this style has remained a lasting as well as distorting force in American thought, and its influence on the posture of the victorious "free" society has had enduring consequences. Then and since, slavery has served as a convenient and perfect enemy. It epitomized evil and became a symbol that has been used to define and justify the social conditions and history of a capitalist, free labor society. A symbol of such convenience obviously would invite distortion; that it has, in fact, done so is suggested by the persistence of certain questionable assumptions about the nature of slave ownership in the antebellum South. For generations historians have been almost unanimous in emphasizing that black slaves were owned by a surprisingly small minority of whites. Allan Nevins states in his distinguished history of the Civil War era that "from the terms used in the angry discussion of slavery, it might have been supposed that almost the whole Southern population had a direct interest in it. Actually, of the 6,184,477 white folk in the slave States, only 347,525 were listed by the census of 1850 as owners, and even this number gave an exaggerated impression of the facts." Adding members of slave owning families and other involved individuals, Nevins increases the figure but retains the emphasis, concluding that the number of whites directly involved in slavery probably "did not exceed 2,000,000. If so, not one-third of the population of the South and [End Page 401] border States had any direct interest in slavery as a form of property. This is a fact of great important [sic ]when we attempt to estimate the effect of slaveholding upon the culture and outlook of the Southern people."2 Nevins' conclusion is invariably affirmed by prominent commentators. According to the standard account by James G. Randall and David Donald "the total number of slaveholders in 1850 was only 347,525 out of a total white population of about six million in the slaveholding areas." Donald is even more emphatic elsewhere when he complains that "writers speak of the Southern interest in slavery, even when they perfectly well know that in the 'plantation' South only one fourth of the white families owned any slaves at all."3 Roy F. Nichols and Elbert B. Smith assume the same stances4 as do the authors of practically all the outstanding college textbooks on the history of the United States. Typically these textbooks include such statements as "only a minority of the whites owned slaves," "at all times nearly three-fourths of the white families in the South as a whole held no slaves"; "only one family in four held any at all"; "slave ownership in the South was not widespread"; "not more than a quarter of the white heads of families were slave-owners, and even in the cotton states the proportion was less than one-third"; "in 1850, only one in three owned any Negroes; on the eve of the Civil War, the ratio was one in four"; and slave owners "probably made up less than a third of southern whites."5 While one seldom can quarrel with the statistics presented by these many writers, serious questions can be raised respecting the significance of this degree of slave distribution in the South. Although the constant conclusion has been that the number of whites owning slaves was remarkably small and that the South was therefore an unusually oligarchical society, the comparative basis [End Page 402] for such a judgment has never been firmly established. Instead, that judgment appears to have rested primarily on a moral repugnance toward slavery and an exceedingly simplistic conception of the meaning of slave ownership. But was the slave South really more oligarchic, especially in an economic sense, than, say, the nineteenth-century North or the United States today? And precisely how does one determine this? What...

Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices From the Field (review)

Since the outrage over the Field Day Anthology'svirtual exclusion of women,feminists and other progressive writers have made a concerted effort to publish and publicize the works and words of Irish women. Irish Women Writers Speak Out is a direct result of this controversy. Although editors Caitriona Moloney and Helen Thompson castigate Field Day'sinitial omission of women, they also maintain that such marginalization is the fault of women writers and editors as well. This attribution of guilt, however, is questionable; Ailbhe Smith and Ann Owens Weekes's names are regularly cited in any critical discussion of Irish women's writing. Moreover, the continued failure of male critics, editors, publishers, and professors to mention or include Irish women writers in anthologies or reading lists suggests that the culture of Irish Studies is hardly woman-friendly.

The Shackles of Reason: Sufi/Deconstructive Opposition to Rational Thought

The status of Ibn 'Arabi and Derrida as thinkers is examined: their disagreements with rational/metaphysical thought on the basis of différance and what Ibn 'Arabi calls al-haqq or the Real. Advantage is taken of the fact that both writers speak of emancipatory projects in their work-the freeing of writing from the shackles of logocentric thought and of the unthinkably Divine (the Real) from the constructs of philosophers and theologians. Just as Ibn 'Arabi believes that no thinker can provide ''a definition of the Real [al haqq],'' Derrida insists that no thinker can escape the history of metaphysics. In the work of both, the reaffirmation of something vital, inconstant, and elusive that defeats all attempts to discuss it plays a common role and evolves according to a common structure. If différance and the Real do seem uncannily analogous-sharing, for example, features like namelessness, radical otherness, intangibility/invisibility/unthinkability, and atemporality, not to mention their paradoxically generative functions-there are also a number of significant differences.

Review Article: Understanding the Regulatory State

misunderstanding the regulatory state?In the last quarter of the twentieth century something transformed government across the advanced capitalist world, and a large amount of comparative political enquiry is now concerned with pinning a convincing label on that transformation. Of the many candidates the subject of this review article has proved especially popular. As I will show, a regulatory state is now commonly said to exist in a wide range of geographical and institutional settings: writers speak of a regulatory state in the United States and in Britain; of the European regulatory state; and even of refinements like ‘a regulatory state inside the state’.

National Competition Policy: The Downside

Identifying the ‘downside’ of competition policy raises the question of whether there is an ‘up‐side’. Competition is supposed to drive the organisers of commodity production to minimise the costs they have to bear in some short to medium term, within environments more or less circumscribed by government regulations. The actual period tends to be that for which the providers of finance are prepared to wait for returns after a poorly performing company is restructured. Economists used to say that cost minimisation requires an industry structure in which there are many independent producers. Nowadays, more enlightened writers speak of ensuring that the market positions held by existing producers are contestable by prospective new producers.The question of what government in Australia may do to establish competition in this sense of competition has recently focussed on the desirable re‐organisation of public enterprises, perhaps especially those that exist at the level of the states. So what are the dimensions of the ‘downside’ of opening the market positions occupied by public enterprises to contestation by private companies, especially those which are monopolies? The answer takes a large measure of the gloss off the Hilmer promises. The problems to be addressed are: the limit put on contestability where there is an element of natural monopoly; the tendency for cost minimisation to depend on the tighter management of labour; and, the difficulty of insisting simultaneously on both ‘competition’ and the satisfaction of ‘community service obligations’ (CSOs).

Who's Talking/Who's Talking Back? The Subject of Personal NarrativeTelling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Timothy Dow AdamsJessie Bernard: The Making of a Feminist. Robert C. BannisterRevealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender. Susan Groag Bell , Marilyn YalomSadie Brower Neakok: An Inupiaq Woman. Margaret B. BlackmanBlack Women Writing Autobiography. Joanne M. BraxtonWinged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Laura ColtelliCrested Kimono: Power

Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of talking back, that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject-the liberated voice. [BELL HOOKS, Talking Back]

Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak

Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak

Reflections on the Role of Personal Narrative in Social ScienceTelling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Timothy Dow AdamsJessie Bernard: The Making of a Feminist. Robert C. BannisterRevealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender. Susan Groag Bell , Marilyn YalomSadie Brower Neakok: An Inupiaq Woman. Margaret B. BlackmanBlack Women Writing Autobiography. Joanne M. BraxtonWinged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Laura ColtelliCrested Kimono:

O NCE UPON A TIME (not so long ago), presenting a social science perspective on personal narratives would have been a relatively uncomplicated exercise. The editors of Signs would have been able to find an author who, despite her attachment to a particular discipline like sociology or political science, held a set of assumptions about the nature of reality, knowledge acquisition, and truth so widely shared among social scientists that editors, readers, and author alike could have felt confident that the product reflected a "typical" or "representative" social science viewpoint. The resulting essay would have been based on (at least) the following assumptions: that the subject matter of interest to social science-that is, social reality-is as hard or concrete as the physical objects studied by botanists or geologists and is "out there" waiting to be revealed; that social science acquires systematic knowledge by adhering to rules of hypothesis testing, controlled (unbiased) observation, and the replication of previous research results; and that by using the prescribed methodology, social science arrives at Truth, which consists of lawlike generalizations that take the form, "Given conditions A, B, and C, when X occurs, Y will follow," laws that make possible the prediction-hence, the control-of events.

Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak

Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak

Review: Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak by Laura Coltelli

Review: <i>Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak</i> by Laura Coltelli