Max Lawton on Antonio Moresco’s The Beginnings
“The most entertaining work of Italian metaphysics since Dante’s Divine Comedy“
The Center for the Art of Translation, City Lights, and Deep Vellum co-present a conversation between Max Lawton and Sean Thor Conroe about the life and work of Italian author Antonio Moresco and The Beginnings, the first book in his colossally disruptive Games of Eternity (Giochi dell’eternità) trilogy.
This is a hybrid event. It will be held onsite at City Lights and livestreamed on zoom. Registration(opens in a new tab) is required to experience the online part of the event.
About The Beginnings
Upon its publication in Italy, The Beginnings was exactly that: the dawning of a new era. Like a photo-negative of Franz Kafka, or Virginia Woolf, Moresco’s sweeping novel turns the stream-of-consciousness inside out, and offers nothing interior. Here, much like in real life, you will not be privy to the thoughts and feelings of others. Everything must be experienced as it happens.
From our narrator’s undergraduate years in seminary school, to his activities as a member of various Italian political factions, to his attempts to become a writer, The Beginnings is a shapeshifting journey across the twentieth century, and across all of literature itself.
About Antonio Moresco
Antonio Moresco was born in Mantua and lives in Milan. Considered one of the founders of modern Italian literature, The Beginnings is his second book to be published by Deep Vellum, after Clandestinity, a collection of short stories. He has gone on to publish several more books, among them the short novel La cipolla (The Onion), the autobiographical Lettere a nessuno (Letters to No One), and Distant Light, which was published by Archipelago in 2013.
Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He received his BA in Russian Literature and Culture from Columbia University and his MPhil from Queen’s College, Oxford, where he wrote a dissertation comparing Céline and Dostoevsky. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin. Max is also the author of two novels currently awaiting publication and is writing his doctoral dissertation on phenomenology and the twentieth-century novel at Columbia University, where he also teaches Russian. He is a member of four noise-music ensembles.
Sean Thor Conroe is a Japanese–American writer. He was born in Tokyo in 1991 and was raised in Scotland, upstate New York, and the greater Bay Area. He studied literature and philosophy at Swarthmore College, and attended the Columbia University School of the Arts. He has guest edited New York Tyrant Magazine and hosts the book podcast 1storypod. He wrote the novel Fuccboi.