As a novelist, essayist, critic, editor, and publisher, Italo Calvino (born 1923) was an ironic and imaginative innovator. Join us as we present Jhumpa Lahiri in conversation with Alessandro Giammei about Calvino's work and global influence.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. Other books include The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award, and the essay collection, Translating Myself and Others. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. The translator of three novels by Domenico Starnone and editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama and was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella.
Alessandro Giammei is Assistant Professor in Yale University's Department of Italian Studies. He is the author of Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2023), co-edited Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting with Ara Merjian (Verso, 2023), and was recently commissioned to do a short monograph on Shakespeare’s ghost in the philology of fascist Italy by Cambridge University Press. In Italian, he wrote Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja (edizioni del verri 2014, Edinburgh Gadda Prize 2015), Una serie ininterrotta di gesti riusciti (Marsilio 2018), Cose da maschi (Einaudi 2023), and Il rinascimento è uno zombie (forthcoming in 2024 with Einaudi). He edited and translated into Italian the letters between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (nottetempo 2021, with Chiara Valerio), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Fotografare gli spiriti (Marsilio 2022), and the volume Giulia Niccolai (quodlibet 2023; with Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri).
Photo courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Carla Cerati / Grazia Neri
