It’s 2007 and we are in Bilbao, worn out by the final blows of Basque terrorism. Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five year old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents. Meanwhile in Paris, Jokin struggles with his attraction to the mysterious Germana, yet, despite the distance, the twins’ lives seem destined to never separate and it will be a French writer’s novel that reconnects them.
The Melee is a polyphonic work; a world that connects reality to our most recondite dreams, a world where the only driving force seems to be blind violence. Can freedom reveal itself to be an instrument of torture, and can empathy that resists absolutism prevail in the face of trauma? Valentina Maini responds in the pages of this provocative debut and its web of stories connecting drug dealers, smugglers, psychiatrists, writers, cleaners and fortune tellers - and she does it with the conviction of Roberto Bolaño and Mathias Énard: looking chaos directly in the eye.
THE MELEE BY VALENTINA MAINI (PUBLISHED IN ITALIAN BY BOLLATI BORINGHIERI, 2020)
FIRST PLACE IN THE L'INDISCRETO QUALITY RANKINGS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEVERINO CESARI DEBUT AWARD 2020
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FONDAZIONE MONDADORI DEBUT AWARD 2020
CHOSEN BY KOBO IN THEIR 50 BOOKS TO DEFY AND SURVIVE THE YEAR 2020
“What is great European literature today? The Melee by Valentina Maini has the range and complexity to fit the bill and the ambition to be part of it.”
VERONICA RAIMO (The Girl at the Door)
“There are writers who, more than make their debut, burst onto the scene. By writing novels that play havoc with all the rules. Valentina Maini is one of them.”
ANDREA BAJANI (If You Kept a Record of Sins; Every Promise)
“Redolent of Clarice Lispector and Roberto Bolano, a haunted, captivating, poetic novel that tells the story of two children of ETA and their quest for life and the future under the tight rein of a true artist and her unique, visionary freedom of language.”
MARTA BARONE (Città sommersa)
“In The Melee, Valentina Maini unfurls a notable variety of textual typologies – reports, statements, recordings, a novel within the novel – showing that it is still possible to tell stories in an impressive, original manner.”
WU MING 2 (Q; Manituana; 54)
Valentina Maini was born in Bologna in 1987. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature between Bologna and Paris and has published short stories in retabloid, TerraNullius, Atti Impuri, Horizonte, and other magazines. Some of her articles have appeared in Poetiche, La Deleuziana, and Classiques Garnier. With her collection of poetry, Casa Rotta (2016), she won the Anna Osti literary prize. She translates from French and from English into Italian.
Sean McDonagh is an emerging literary translator who translates from Italian. He is based in London where he works in publishing, and has been pursuing literary translation projects since participating in the Warwick Translates Summer School 2019. He has had a translation published on Asymptote, and as a poet has also had work published on Allegro, Rockland and Foxtrot Uniform. Sean has a BA in English, has lived and studied in Turin, and has completed an advanced course at the Italian Cultural Institute.
@seanpjamcdonagh (Twitter)
seanmcdonaghtranslator.com
For rights info, contact: Flavia Abbinante - flavia.abbinante@bollatiboringhieri.it
Rights Sold: Portuguese
The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.
TO READ A LONGER EXTRACT, please visit: seanmcdonaghtranslator.com/projects-seeking-a-publisher
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![Description: Queer love poems from the Roaring Twenties (Loucos Anos Vinte). “A minha Amante” (pp. 112–13), “My Lover” (pp. 43–44). “Duma carta” (122–23), “From a Letter” (pp. 53–54). Author: Judith Teixeira (1880–1959) was perhaps the only bisexual woman poet to participate openly in Lisbon’s modernist literary scene. Her civil status—born to a single mother in the provincial city of Viseu, divorced at age thirty-three by her first husband, re-married the following year to the grandson of a viscount—had already made her the subject of scandal. But still more scandalous was the sexually transgressive writing she published under her own name only a few years before the rise of the Salazar dictatorship. Translator: Samantha Pious is a translator, poet, editor, and researcher. In addition to Judith Teixeira, she has translated selections from the poetry of Renée Vivien, which are available as A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2015, revised 2017), and from Natalie Clifford Barney, which are forthcoming. Order a copy of Judith Teixeira, Cactus Flowers: Selected Poems, trans. Samantha Pious (Headmistress Press, 2025): https://a.co/d/7kBr8dS https://headmistress-press.square.site/product/cactus-flowers-selected-poems-judith-teixeira-translated-by-samantha-pious/104?cs=true&cst=custom Praise for Cactus Flowers: “Samantha Pious’s translations from the Portuguese of Judith Teixeira’s poetry in Cactus Flowers resounds with sensual energy and burning tenderness. Reading these poems, one is struck not only with the passion of Teixeira’s queer love poems but by the way in which turbulent politics and social tensions are subtly traceable within the lines. […] The lone reader is thrown into the bodily world, reminding us that words first and foremost are of the body and its unique experiences.” —Allison Grimaldi Donahue “Judith Teixeira’s poetry has almost always, over the decades, discomfited specialists […] This English edition—with a selection and preface by Samantha Pious, wherein I would underline the sensitivity and care of her fine translations, as well as her personal commitment—allows Anglophone readers to connect with the first Portuguese woman writer to sing of lesbian love, transforming women’s bodies into objects of worship and of carnal consummation.” —Fabio Mario da Silva Find translator Samantha Pious online: https://samanthapious.com/ @samantha.pious Judith Teixeira died in 1959, widowed and without issue; the rights holder(s) is/are unknown. If you have information regarding her estate, please contact the publisher at headmistresspress@gmail.com.](https://translatorsaloud.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)