The literature that questions is the best, that which tells is the most useful, and the literature that seeks is the synthesis of the first two. But what to look for? What to avoid? Literature is like travel, it is like the difference between the traveler and the tourist. We are often tourists and increasingly forced into the monotony of tourism. We are all going in the same direction and seeing things from one perspective. It is not only about the taste of discovery, but about the unique taste of adventure of walking alone towards a destination, without a navigator, mobile phone or tour guide with only one certainty: that we have no certainties. Unfortunately, we have limited ourselves to the opposite of adventure, our bodies already know everything and often know before the adventure begins. We hope that literature, in all its forms, can overturn this order that is too obvious to be boring. Therefore, we risk being on our vacations like prisoners of a telemarketing task force. We are brutally forced into a bubble where the concept of fun is highly questionable. Hi Michaela and thank you for everything!

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI – “Travel diaries and literature” – The Assayer
Lawrence Ferlinghetti could only be a tireless traveller, a cosmopolitan to the bitter end, a wanderer eager for life and landscape. Born in America to a mother of French descent and an Italian father who died before she met him, he lived in Strasbourg and then returned to America. He studied literature at the Sorbonne, took part in the Normandy landings, was overcome by that wave of restlessness and desire, writing and rebellion that took the name of the Beat generation. He continued to travel, writing masterpieces like “A Coney Island of the Mind,” while founding a beacon of independent publishing like City Lights, and shaking up America, not just literature, by publishing books like Alien Ginsberg’s “Scream” — about which tried on the charge of spreading obscenity – or participated in the political battles of his time, observing the revolution in Cuba and Nicaragua with a poetic and libertarian eye or its degeneration in Soviet Russia. “Writing on the road” brings together the diaries, until now unpublished in Italy, written during more than fifty years of racing on ships, planes, steam trains, Volkswagen trucks.

Pages that make up a single world of work, in which characters such as Fidel Castro, writers and poets such as Ezra Pound, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg himself meet. an endless Homeric journey from the Paris of nostalgia to the Italy of the roots, from a Kafkaesque Russia, seen in the Orient Express, to a nocturnal, drunken and exuberant Mexico, from the motels of America on the way to Marrakesh, in Australia, in Spain of Franco. With his verses, his drawings and his telluric and enchanting prose, Lawrence Ferlinghetti bears witness to his passage into the twentieth century and beyond, among poets and beggars, great capitals and slums. He turns his gaze to boundless expanses of snow or tiny raindrops, to shacks, peasants, donkeys, dogs, arid land. And it turns the journey into a form of meditation, into a search for what is human and what is eternal, into a song composed of encounters, words, landscapes.

MICHELA MURGIA – “The world must know” – Einaudi
In 2006 Michela Murgia was hired in the call center of the American multinational Kirby, producer of the “monster”, object of worship and devotion of a group of hundreds of operators and salespeople: a three thousand euro vacuum cleaner. While for thirty endless days she specializes in covert persuasion techniques, the author opens a blog, where she reports live the hell of telemarketing with preparation techniques, incentive meetings, rewards and psychological scams, salaries and corporate punishments. As funny as a sitcom and as true as a prophecy, The World Must Know achieves the miracle of outrage and laughter. Because ten years after it was first published, everyone should know that, in the meat grinder of the working world, little or nothing has changed.

Antonio Mandese
Bookseller and publisher