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Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) published his debut novel, Boys Alive, in 1955. It was hailed as a masterpiece by prominent Italian writers and condemned as pornographic by Marxist critics and the conservative judiciary of Milan. In the decades that followed, he published many more novels, books of poetry, essays, and plays. He also became a screenwriter and filmmaker, collaborating with Federico Fellini on Le Notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita and directing films such as The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, and Theorem, which Pasolini had first published as a novel earlier the same year. A figure of controversy due to his antiestablishment political views and homosexuality, he was brought to trial at least thirty-three times. He was brutally murdered under mysterious circumstances on the beach in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome. Ann Goldstein is an editor and translator from the Italian language. Best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, she has also translated works by Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, and Alba de Cespedes, among others. Andre Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, The Promised Land- Poems from an Itinerant Life and High Desert, as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger- An Anthology of Exile Literature. He has translated works by Honore de Balzac, mile Zola, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdellatif La bi, Rachid Boudjedra, Ribka Sibhatu and Fabio Franzin. He is Assistant Professor of English, French and Italian at the University of California, Davis, where he also teaches on the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
“With shifts from social realism to wild fabulation, sustained allusions to a half-dozen works of literature, and the numerous short essays scattered throughout the text, Petrolio is the work of a writer confident he can turn his manuscript into a kind of encyclopedic novel. All he needed was time. The surviving cluster of sketches and fragments is, by turns, brilliant and almost unreadable.” — Scott McLemee, Salon “A trove of searingly beautiful apercus and images, a caustic compendium of this modern-day Jeremiah's last thoughts on class, anthropology, sex, psychoanalysis and male hairstyles. Petrolio reveals its author as the grateful possessor of a Mediterranean culture stretching from Homer through Apollonius of Tyana and Petronius, and on to Dante and Leopardi — a salty humanistic tradition to which Pasolini, chaser of slum boys, lover of flashy sports cars, castigator of the powerful, was the fitting heir.” — Fernanda Eberstadt, The New York Times “Translator Ann Goldstein was heroic in her herculean undertaking” — George Armstrong, The Los Angeles Times “Petrolio recoils from the linearity of a text written ""a schidionata,"" like the meat speared and cooked on a skewer… Instead, the novel is composed ""a brulichio"" as it strives to attain the churning and amorphous configuration of a teeming mass.” — Deborah Amberson, Quaderni d'italianistica
