In the deep, dark, frigid days of winter, what could be more fun than curling up in a blanket with a shivery ghost story? Set during summer vacation, The Ghosts of Pandora Pickwick is a wonderful combination of two evergreen middle grade tropes: the aforementioned ghost tale and an adoption/origin story. Protagonist Mia Jones has … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Wednesday: The Ghosts of Pandora Pickwick
What’s faster than a jet? Or bigger than a whale? And have you ever wondered how many vertebrae are in a giraffe’s neck? These and myriad other fascinating questions are the focus of Faster Than a Jet, Bigger Than a Whale: An Illustrated Guide to Measuring Our World, a wonderful nonfiction book for readers age … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Wednesday: Faster Than a Jet, Bigger Than a Whale: An Illustrated Guide to Measuring Our World
Welcome back to #WorldKidLit month! Today we will be looking at some more wonderful Italian picture books. Sergio Ruzzier is an Italian illustrator, author, and translator. He was a 2011 Sendak Fellow, won the Andersen Prize in Italy in 2023, and has had two of his books (Fox and Chick: The Party in 2019, and … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Month 2025: Sergio Ruzzier
Today's post comes to us from Angela Roberts. Felicita Sala is an author and illustrator whose work I return to again and again. I have read and reread her stories and frequently recommend them to my patrons. My first encounter with Sala’s work was about six or seven years ago, on the recommendation of a … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Month 2025: Author and Illustrator Felicita Sala
Baron Lamberto, 93 years old and in failing health, lives in a mansion on an island in the middle of Lake Orta, in northern Italy. Living from the proceeds of his 24 banks around the world, he is waited on by his butler, Anselmo, and an army of cooks, servants, and, strangely, six people in … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Wednesday: Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto
Written by Kim Beeman The list below is loosely, but mostly, young adult books, all translated from Italian into English. As I have discovered in my time in Italy, relatively few middle grade and young adult books have been translated from Italian into English. Last October was #ItalianLit month on GLLI, and this wrap-up post … Continue reading #INTYALITMONTH: Italian YA in Translation
by Leah Janeczko Dear reader, October has been quite a month! San Girolamo – St. Jerome, patron saint of translators – has accompanied us down a long, scenic, winding path through the Italian literary landscape on a discovery of great Italian books in English translation. Long, not because it has lasted thirty-one days but because … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.50: One Hundred Cantos
by Michael Palma Dante’s contemporary fortunes have been especially various, I believe, in the United States and Great Britain, where translations have appeared, and continue to appear, at a remarkable rate. About a decade ago someone observed that the first ten years of the new century had seen the publication of at least ten new … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.49: A New Translation of Dante: The Music I Kept Hearing in My Head
by Leah Janeczko Three years ago, three friends in India who loved reading – Harsha, Giri and Anil, who had been friends for 25 years and studied mechanical engineering together – started a podcast dedicated to novels and short stories in their native language of Telugu. They called the program Harshaneeyam, a play on words … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.48: The Harshaneeyam Podcast and Its Italian Literature in Translation Playlist
by Michael F. Moore Martina Franca, in Puglia, is the hometown of the writer Mario Desiati, and the setting of almost all of his novels. The town, and indeed the region as a whole, is so ubiquitous in his latest, the Strega Prize-winning Spatriati, as to become one of the book’s main characters, alongside the … Continue reading #ItalianLitMonth n.47: Reclaiming Puglia in Mario Desiati’s Spatriati
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 