Marco Archetti - Il Foglio

Marco Archetti

unpredictable trajectories

"Following the Trail" is a great story, just like the ones from the old days

In Assaf Gavron’s novel, the stories of the four protagonists in 1970s Jerusalem indirectly recount the founding of Israel, intertwining it with the present day

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26 SEP 26

Photo: ANSA

aperi-patemi

It turns out we actually needed AI to realise we’re writing badly

This year at the Mantua Literature Festival, a single spectre haunted – or rather, ran riot amongst – the writers: that of artificial intelligence. It even swallowed up the gossip, which was never as scarce as this year, nor as feeble.

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19 SEP 26

(Photo: Getty)

Read with relish

Max, Mischa and the wave of beautiful books that everyone’s talking about

Johan Harstad’s latest novel, widely read and equally beloved, truly deserves its success. What can we learn from a literary phenomenon that is nothing but a cause for celebration?

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5 SEP 26

Photo: ANSA

pages

Tragedy in a room. Rediscovering Glenway Wescott

A writer of boundless vitality: seventy years with the same partner, the ménage à trois, the enormous success and fame, now a thing of the past. The great writer and his masterpiece, “Appartamento ad Atene”

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29 AUG 26

Glenway Wescott (1901–1987), on the left, with his lifelong partner, Monroe Wheeler, in 1982 (photo by Nancy R. Schiff/Getty Images)

Lives straight out of a novel, in a hotel

Hotels are part of our collective imagination, and literature has drawn on this

The enigmatic characters of Roth’s Savoy, the drama of Simenon’s Majestic, the hidden horrors of King’s Overlook. The relationship between places of hospitality and novels is not merely about opulence, but, more generally, draws on the symbolic power of a place that mimics a home yet, in reality, merely serves as a waystation

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22 AUG 26

Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe were regulars at the Chelsea Hotel in New York (photo: Stephen Lovekin/FilmMagic via Getty Images)

character without requirements

John Fante, or free and uninhibited literature

Summer 2026: time for a re-read. Don’t wait until spring to rediscover Bandini and his struggle with life

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15 AUG 26

John Fante, or free and uninhibited literature

SOMETHING TO READ

A philosophy course in six and a quarter hours

A review of the book by Witold Gombrowicz, published by Bompiani, 160 pp., 12 euros

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12 AUG 26

A philosophy course in six and a quarter hours

the dissident author

Understanding Putin’s language with Mikhail Shishkin

One of Russia’s great living writers reveals the peculiar relationship between words and meanings in the world of the Kremlin. How many lies has the West swallowed?

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8 AUG 26

Shishkin describes today’s Russia as “a criminal police state” (Getty photo). Below, the writer, who has lived in Switzerland since 1995, at a rally in support of Ukraine in Lucerne (Ansa photo)

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