This page showcases some of our existing publications, including videos.
Juliet is Dead: Romeo’s Lost Scene
Based on Matteo Bandello’s Romeo and Juliet, this short film, commissioned by Aldila Press and directed by Rhianna Spooner thrusts audiences into a climactic moment when Romeo hears that Juliet is dead. This scene was “lost in translation” and did not make it into Shakespeare’s play, even though the play is based (through translation) on Bandello’s novella.
Ten Lives Declaring Human Rights
They walked in the darkest parts of human history: in the blood of genocide, the chains of slavery, in the oppression of women, in the death camps of the Holocaust and in the hatred and exclusion of racism. Yet, where others could see only our worst, they saw another path. And what they discovered, they taught to the rest of us. These ten, and others like them, “declared” human rights by their very lives. Often long before the ideas appeared in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were there. When human rights were being born, they were there. Some of their names will be familiar, others will not. Bartolome de Las Casas, Thomas Clarkson, Lucretia Mott, Tahirih, Frederick Douglass, Alain Locke, Primo Levi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. and Albie Sachs. Yet, you won’t find the “official” story of human rights in this book. Indeed, most of the lives you find here, barely appear in that official story. What are human rights? What does it mean to work for them? As we follow their stories we will see through their eyes.
The Dragon the Witch and the Daughters by Luigi Capuana
From a master of Italian verismo comes a classic short story of the genre, but with a twist. As characters come into conflict with each other, and “the Dragon” with himself, Capuana weaves together the grimness of real life with threads of subtle fairytale.
For the first time translated into English by Michael Curtotti, The Dragon the Witch and the Daughters, transports us into the life of a nineteenth century village. Don Paolo Drago, “dragon by name, dragon by nature,” appears to dominate this world, yet he barely controls his own thoughts and feelings. Despite himself, he is drawn into the destiny of two orphans.
Yet tragedy stalks the life of Don Paolo. His own daughters and wife are dead and long buried in the grave. Like a living ghost, he waits for death, carrying on a wretched existence. His bitterness is his one defense, in a world full of emptiness. Yet the arrival of the orphans challenges everything he has believed.
Could his daughters really return from the grave?
Of the author:
“ … the iconic representative in Italy of the art of Zola or the natural …” Luigi Pirandello (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
“… a leader of the verismo movement … [who] himself rebelled [against it]” Hilda Norman
“… an erudite researcher and collector of tales …” Gina Miele
Othello by Cinthio
Forthcoming.