About the Books

About the Author

The novelist, poet and dramatist Giacomo Sartori was born in 1958 in Trento in the Alpine northeast of Italy near the Austrian border. An agronomist, he is a soil specialist whose unusual day job (unusual for a writer) has shaped a distinctive concrete and poetic literary style. He has worked abroad with international development agencies in a number of countries, and has taught at the Università di Trento. He was over 30 when he began writing, and has since published seven novels and four collections of stories as well as poetry and texts for the stage. He’s an editor of the literary collective Nazione Indiana and contributes to the blog www.nazioneindiana.com.

Sartori took as his subject in his early novels Tritolo (TNT) and Sacrificio (Sacrifice) the stifling provincial atmosphere of the valleys of his native region and the twisted lives of its most vulnerable inhabitants. A recent novel Rogo (At the Stake), also set in the region, is written in the voices of three women from different historical periods who commit infanticide. The autofiction Anatomia della battaglia (The Anatomy of the Battle) about a young man’s effort to come to terms with and define his manhood against the model of his father, a committed Fascist, and the historical novel Cielo nero (Black Heavens), deal with fascism and its dark, persistent allure. Sartori’s shorter fiction includes the book of interrelated absurdist stories Autismi (Autisms, 2018) written in the voice of a person struggling to cope with the bizarre, baffling customs and expectations that all around him seem to share. The black humor and pessimism are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. Several stories from Autismi have appeared in Frederika Randall’s English translation in The Massachusetts Review, and an excerpt from L’Anatomia della battaglia, also translated by Randall, appeared in The Arkansas International no 2. At present he lives between Paris and Trento.

About the Translator

Frederika Randall (New Castle, Pennsylvania, 1948–2020) was a writer, reporter and translator. She grew up in Pittsburgh and lived in Italy for 30 years (also New York and London). She worked as a cultural journalist for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale among others. Her translations include Luigi Meneghello’s Deliver Us; Guido Morselli’s The Communist and Dissipatio H. G.; the epic tale of the Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of An Italian; as well as fiction by Davide Orecchio, Igiaba Scego, Ottavio Cappellani and Helena Janeczek. Further translations include historian Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce, his Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, for which she and the author shared the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature in 2011, and Luzzatto’s Primo Levi’s Resistance, 2016, shortlisted for the 2017 Italian Prose in Translation Award. Her translation of Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God won the 2019 Foreword INDIE Gold Award for Literary Fiction. Other awards include a 2009 PEN-Heim Translation Grant, and a Bogliasco Fellowship, 2013. She died in Rome in May 2020.