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The Other Voice’s edition of Barbara Torelli’s pastoral drama Partenia (c. 1586) is a groundbreaking contribution to the study of early modern Italian literature and women’s writing. This is the first ever print edition of the earliest secular play by an Italian woman, acclaimed at the time of its composition—the drama theorist Angelo Ingegneri placed it on a par with Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Pastor fido—but long forgotten, to the extent that it was believed lost until the early twentieth century, when the first manuscript of it surfaced in Cremona.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) was one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the post–World War II era. An astonishing polymath—poet, novelist, literary critic, political polemicist, screenwriter, and film director—he exerted profound influence on Italian culture up to his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. This revised edition of what the New York Times Book Review has called “the standard Pasolini biography” introduces the artist to a new generation of readers.

Based on extensive interviews with those who knew Pasolini, both friends and enemies, admirers and detractors, Pasolini Requiem chronicles his growth from poet in the provinces to Italy’s leading “civil poet”; his flight to Rome in 1950; the scandalous success of his two novels and political writing; and his transition to film, where he started as a contributor to the golden age of Italian cinema and ended with the shocking Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini’s tragic and still unsolved murder has remained a subject of contentious debate for four decades. The enduring fascination with who committed the crime—and why—reflects his vital stature in Italy’s political and social history.

Updated throughout and with a new afterword covering the efforts to reopen the investigation—and the legal maelstrom surrounding Pasolini’s demise—this edition of Pasolini Requiem is a riveting account of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial, ever-present iconoclasts.

Phonetics and Diction in Singing was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This book provides rules and illustrative examples for the study of songs and operas in the leading foreign languages of musical literature. The author is conductor and chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera. He has drawn the material from his larger book, The Art of Accompanying and Coaching,to provide a handbook or textbook especially suitable for use by voice teachers, singers, students in high schools, colleges, and schools of music, and members of choruses, church choirs, and opera workshops and their directors. Following a general discussion of phonetics and diction in singing there are separate chapters on Italian, French, Spanish, and German phonetics and diction. The text is illustrated with drawings and diagrams of vocal techniques and musical examples.

Fairy tales are supposed to be magical, surprising, and exhilarating, an enchanting counterpoint to everyday life that nonetheless helps us understand and deal with the anxieties of that life. Today, however, fairy tales are far from marvelous—in the hands of Hollywood, they have been stripped of their power, offering little but formulaic narratives and tame surprises.
 
If we want to rediscover the power of fairy tales—as Armando Maggi thinks we should—we need to discover a new mythic lens, a new way of approaching and understanding, and thus re-creating, the transformative potential of these stories. In Preserving the Spell, Maggi argues that the first step is to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narrative that together created the fairy tales we know today. He begins his exploration with the ur-text of European fairy tales, Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, then traces its path through later Italian, French, English, and German traditions, with particular emphasis on the Grimm Brothers’ adaptations of the tales, which are included in the first-ever English translation in an appendix. Carrying his story into the twentieth century, Maggi mounts a powerful argument for freeing fairy tales from their bland contemporary forms, and reinvigorating our belief that we still can find new, powerfully transformative ways of telling these stories.