Books by Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Street Kids

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

The “provocative” novel about hard-living teenagers in poverty-stricken postwar Rome, by the renowned Italian filmmaker (The New York Times).

Set during the post–World War II years in the Rome of the borgate―outlying neighborhoods beset by poverty and deprivation―The Street Kids tells the story of a group of adolescents belonging to the urban underclass. Living hand-to-mouth, Riccetto and his friends eke out an existence doing odd jobs, committing petty crimes, and prostituting themselves. Rooted in the neorealist movement of the 1950s, The Street Kids is a tender, heart-rending tribute to an entire social class in danger of being forgotten.
Heavily censored and criticized, lambasted by much of the general public upon its publication, The Street Kids nevertheless had a force and vitality that eventually led to its being considered a masterpiece. This new translation comes from Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

The Divine Mimesis

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written between 1963 and 1967, The Divine Mimesis, Pasolini's imitation of the early cantos of the Inferno, offers a searing critique of Italian society and the intelligentsia of the 1960s. It is also a self-critique by the author of The Ashes of Gramsci (1957) who saw the civic world evoked by that book fading absolutely from view. By the mid-1960s, Pasolini theorized, the Italian language had sacrificed its connotative expressiveness for the sake of a denuded technological language of pure communication. In this context, he projects a 'rewrite' of Dante's Commedia in which two historical embodiments of Pasolini himself occupy the roles of the pilgrim and guide in their underworld journey. Densely layered with poetic and philological allusions, and illuminated by a parallel text of photographs that juxtapose the world of the Italian literati to the simple reality of rural Italian life, this narrative was curtailed by Pasolini several years before he sent it to his publisher, a few months prior to his murder in 1975. Yet, many of Pasolini's projects took the provisional form of "Notes toward..." an eventual work, such as Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Scouting in Palestine), Appunti per una Oresteiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia), and Appunti per un film sull'India (Notes for a Film on India). The Divine Mimesis has a kinship to these filmic works as Pasolini himself ruled it 'complete' though still in a partial form. Written at a turning point in his life when he was wrestling with his poetic 'demons, ' the true center of gravity of Pasolini's Dantean project is the potential of poetry to teach and probe, ethically and aesthetically, in reality. "I wanted to make something seething and magmatic," Pasolini declared, "even if in prose." In this first English translation of Pasolini's La divina mimesis, Italianist Thomas E. Peterson offers historical, linguistic, and cultural analyses that aim to expand the discourse about an enigmatic author considered by many to be the greatest Italian poet after Montale. Published by Contra Mundum Press one year in advance of the 40th anniversary of Pasolini's death. * In the history of twentieth-century poetry, there is no other poet besides Pasolini who has more tenaciously interrogated his own 'I, ' more persistently contemplated it, admired it, examined it, analyzed it and dissected it in order then to show its suffering entrails to the world, as they beg for understanding, affection, and pity. - Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti *

Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Now in paperback, a collection of the legendary filmmaker's short fiction and nonfiction from 1950 to 1966, in which we see the machinations of the creative mind in post-World War II Rome.

In a portrait of the city at once poignant and intimate, we find artistic witness to the customs, dialect, squalor, and beauty of the ancient imperial capital that has succumbed to modern warfare, marginalization, and mass culture. The sketches portray the impoverished masses that Pasolini calls "the sub-proletariat," those who live under Third World conditions and for whom simple pleasures, such as a blue sweater in a storefront window, are completely out of reach.

Pasolini's art develops throughout the works collected here, from his early lyricism to tragicomic outlines for screenplays, and finally to the maturation of his Neo-realism in eight chronicles on the shantytowns of Rome. The pieces in this collection were all published in Italian journals and newspapers, and then later edited by Walter Siti in the original Italian edition.

Heretical Empiricism

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

This expanded edition of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s long out-of-print Heretical Empiricism (Indiana Un. Press, 1988) includes a new introduction by Ben Lawton that discusses the relevance of the book in the 30th anniversary of the author’s death. It also features the first approved translation of "Repudiation of the Trilogy of Life," one of Pasolini’s most controversial final essays. While Pasolini is best known in the U.S. as a revolutionary film director, in Italy he was also very well known as poet, novelist, playwright, political gadfly, and scholar of the semiotics of film.

In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

In Danger is the first anthology in English devoted to the political and literary essays of Pier Paolo Pasolini, with a generous selection of his poetry. Against the backdrop of post-war Italy, and through the mid-'70s, Pasolini's writings provide a fascinating portrait of a Europe in which fascists and communists violently clashed for power and where journalists ran great risks. The controversial and openly gay Pasolini was murdered at the age of fifty-three; In Danger includes his final interview, conducted hours before his death.

Saint Paul: A Screenplay

by Alain Badiou, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton

Presented here for the first time in English is a remarkable screenplay about the apostle Paul by Pier Paolo Pasolini, legendary filmmaker, novelist, poet, and radical intellectual activist. Written between the appearance of his renowned film Teorema and the shocking, controversial Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, St Paul was deemed too risky for investors. At once a political intervention and cinematic breakthrough, the script forces a revolutionary transformation on the contemporary legacy of Paul. In Pasolini’s kaleidoscope, we encounter fascistic movements, resistance fighters, and faltering revolutions, each of which reflects on aspects of the Pauline teachings. From Jerusalem to Wall Street and Greenwich Village, from the rise of SS troops to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr, here—as Alain Badiou writes in the foreword—‘Paul’s text crosses all these circumstances intact, as if it had foreseen them all’.

This is a key addition to the growing debate around St Paul and to the proliferation of literature centred on the current turn to religion in philosophy and critical theory, which embraces contemporary figures such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben.

The Long Road of Sand

by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Philippe Séclier

In the summer of 1959, Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled the entire Italian coastline at the wheel of a Fiat 1100. His diary, The Long Road of Sand, was published in three installments in the magazine Successo. Forty years after the author's death, the photographer Philippe Séclier revisits this journey in his series of black-and-white photographs. This book presents the full text of Pasolini's The Long Road of Sand, including numerous unpublished passages, together with the original typescript.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) was an Italian poet, journalist, filmmaker, scriptwriter, actor, songwriter, and writer. He is considered one of the major Italian artists and intellectuals of twentieth century.

The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works―Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales among them. What most people are not aware of is that he was primarily a poet, publishing nineteen books of poems during his lifetime, as well as a visual artist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. Half a dozen of these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years, but even if one were to read all of those, the wide range of poetic styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would still elude the English-language reader.

For the first time, Anglophones will now be able to discover the many facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically motivated volumes currently available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from every period of Pasolini’s poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences, and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social spheres but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for which he is most known in the United States today. This volume shows how central poetry was to Pasolini, no matter what else he was doing in his creative life, and how poetry informed all of his work from the visual arts to his political essays to his films. Pier Paolo Pasolini was “a poet of the cinema,” as James Ivory says in the book’s foreword, who “left a trove of words on paper that can live on as the fast-deteriorating images he created on celluloid cannot.”

This generous selection of poems will be welcomed by poetry lovers and film buffs alike and will be an event in American letters.

Boys Alive

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors.

Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.

There is no one story to the book, only stories, splitting off, breaking away, going nowhere, flaming out, stories in which scenes of comic debacle, bitter conflict, wild joy, and crushing disappointment quickly follow. Pasolini's young characters have nothing to trade on except youth, and the struggle to live is unending. They loot, hustle, scavenge, steal. Somehow money will turn up; as soon as it does it will get spent. The main thing, in any case, is to have fun, and so the boys boast and vie, the desperate uncertainty of their days and nights offset by the fabulous inventiveness of their words. A warehouse heist, a night of gambling, the hunt for sex: The world of Boys Alive is a world in convulsion where at any instant disaster may strike.

Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and brilliance of a still-scandalous work of art.