By Rossana Campo
Translated by Adria Frizzi
ISBN: 9781943150793
Publication Date: 11/03/2020
Six Italian women living in Paris gather for a drunken dinner party, an occasion for ribald storytelling and gossip, shocking confession and soul-searching, unexpected revelation and painful betrayal, and, ultimately, profound and enduring female solidarity.
Rossana Campo blends pop and high culture in this polyphonic novel whose vibrant, colloquial language gleefully overturns stuffy literary convention, subverts the expectations of genre and narrative, and celebrates orality in all its untamed glory. Bawdy, exuberant, hilarious, Never Felt So Good is a deliciously ironic depiction of female sexuality and friendship, an irrepressible stream of overlapping female voices, a symposium in the truest sense.
Reviews
"ROSSANA CAMPO(b. 1963) burst on the Italian literary scene in 1992 with a picaresque novel about underwear: her own ... Campo’s female characters transgress all codes of decorum and good taste. What’s important is that they not “suffer in silence” like windup dolls, that they bare their souls. It would have been easy for a translator to de-jargonize these rapid-fire exchanges, to smooth Campo’s raucous yawp. But Frizzi’s translation is true to the author’s fiercely pro-woman ethos and colloquial register." —World Literature Today
Biographical Information
Rossana Campo (1963) is an Italian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and painter. Her debut novel, In the Beginning Was Underwear (1992), earned her a reputation as one of the “bad girls” of contemporary Italian literature, an original and transgressive new voice. Her many novels include Where Are You Going to Find Another Father Like Mine (2016), which was awarded the prestigious Premio Strega Giovani and the Elsa Morante Prize.
Adria Frizzi is a scholar and translator of Italian and Latin American literature. Her translations include works by Marina Colasanti, Osman Lins, Caio Fernando Abreu, Regina Rheda, Dacia Maraini, Elena Ferrante, and Rossana Campo. She teaches Italian and translation studies at the University of Texas at Austin.