Two Italians

Today's issue of Shelf Awareness dedicated to Rizzoli's Ex Libris imprint delighted me because it features two of my favourite Italians.

Umberto Eco

An oldie but a goodie. As the years pass, I like Eco's fiction less and less — it was all downhill after Foucault's Pendulum. But my appreciation of his work in the realms of semiotics, aesthetics, etc. continues.

His new book, The Book of Legendary Lands, will be published November 19. "This book is not concerned with fictional places alone. [...] I am dealing instead with those places that many people believed to have really existed, like the Earthly Paradise or Atlantis."

While I think the legend of Atlantis is a little tired (and for this reason I'm having a heckuva time plodding through William Azuski's Travels in Elysium), I'm curious to read Eco's erudite take "on why writers are compelled to create these worlds — and why readers are drawn to them."

Plus, it's illustrated, and if the publisher's website is anything to go by, it's bound to be gorgeous.

Gianrico Carofiglio

Sigh.

My literary crush of earlier this year was resurrected on reading this short interview. I mean, we share some of the same favourite authors! And he loves Stoner. And some of the books that changed his life changed my life! And he's so handsome and charming!

Sigh.

Carofiglio's new novel, The Silence of the Wave, is a standalone thriller involving a former undercover narcotics agent, his visits to a psychiatrist, and an 11-year-old boy's nightmares.