Don DeLillo, the intrigue of America on newsstands with the «Corriere»- Corriere.it

With one of the most documented and gripping John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassination novels, Libra by Don DeLillo, the new «Americana» series continues, edited by the two-time Witch Award Sandro Veronesi: today DeLillo’s masterpiece is on the newsstands (a And 8.90 plus the cost of the newspaper), but the first volume already released last week also remains on salethe irreverent masterpiece Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (translation by Pier Francesco Paolini). The graphic design of the series is by XxY Studio, and the images all come from The Anonymous Project archive curated by Lee Shulman.

As Veronesi himself explained, each volume of the 27 titles in the series has a preface by a well-known Italian writer: critical overview texts, yes, but also stories of what each of these masterpiece-novels represented on a collective and personal level. DeLillo’s novel (in the splendid translation by Massimo Bocchiola), according to Emanuele Trevi, who signs the prefacenot only is it the result of a more than ten-year study of papers and documents, but uncovers a typical aspect of American society then and nowthe paranoia: delves into the personality of Lee Harvey Oswald, the bomber, but also reveals the network of double agents, infiltrators, unsuspected conspirators, in short, “the profound nature of all kinds of intrigue”.

“In the destinies of the last 70-80 years – comments Veronesi – it has not been possible not to cross America: it concerns us all, whatever life we ​​have chosen to lead”. Even the generations of the twentieth century had sensed it, explains the curator: two historic anthologies of short stories, which inspired the spirit of the series, had already gathered the great voices of twentieth-century literature, American by Elio Vittorini from 1941 and My America by Franco Cordelli from 1991, evoked by Veronesi also in the presentation. The titles of this new series, however, collect above all those “giants” who have also faced the new millennium, recording the traumas and fears of the new era, and drawing the literary trends of the 21st century.

For example, a book like Sister, my only love by Joyce Carol Oates (translation by Giuseppe Costigliola, on newsstands July 19), with an afterword by Teresa Ciabatti, is not only a great story inspired by a news story (the murder of a beauty queen), but shows, according to Ciabatti «the ambition of middle class American to excel”. AND it does so by inventing a new way of narrating, a direct take on lifewith handwritten inserts, pages of notes, small drawings that seem to be from a child.

Not by chance, explains Veronesi, the great America cradle of Pop loved literature to the point of often making films: reading these books you will encounter characters and moral tempers that give us back the entire American imagination at its best: so much so that, as Alessandro Piperno writes in the preface a The way home by Kent Haruf (on newsstands July 26, translation by Fabio Cremonesi): «When I read the novel, Clint Eastwood immediately comes to mind».

The images and the graphic project

All the volumes of «Americana», the new series of the «Corriere» edited by Sandro Veronesi, have on the cover the American photographs of The Anonymous Project by the filmmaker Lee Shulman, an archive of private images from all over the world. XxY Studio graphic project.