Robin Pickering-Iazzi
AUTHOR

Robin Pickering-Iazzi

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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Since the 1970s during the years of lead when I lived in Rome, Italy and the U.S. are my homes where I work as author, translator, public speaker and professor of Italian Studies. This experience of being an insider and outsider in both cultures at the same time shapes my discussions of facets of Italian life, society, culture and politics as related to subjects ranging from cuisine and fashion to the mafia and Fascism. I'm especially fascinated by the deep contrasts between the richly diverse stories Italians tell about themselves and the fantasies of Italy many Americans entertain, dominated by the exotic, seductive woman, the eternal mother slaving in the kitchen, the gigolo, or the mafioso. In my works I explore such contrasts, aiming to enable readers to have a fuller understanding of daily living, society, and culture in Italy. My recent works focus on the ongoing battles for democracy in Italy, against all forms of corruption and the mafias in territories throughout the country, as illustrated in Italian novels, films, new media, and grassroots citizen movements. These issues, along with mafia ways of thinking and acting and antimafia forms of resistance, form the heart of my books The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and Their Geographies and The Italian Antimafia, New Media, and the Culture of Legality, a collection of multi-authored essays that I edited. With the idea of enabling general readers to discover how award-winning Italian authors and citizen writers describe their own experiences and ideas about the mafia and breaking the law of silence to resist it, I selected and translated fiction and non-fiction writings, gathered in my volume Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature. The mafia and confronting its realities is a fascinating subject, but may seem to have little relevance in the lives of most Americans. On the contrary, Italian mafia stories speak to problems plaguing many cities today, such as violent crime, youth gangs increasing their power through acts of violence, cultures of silence, white-collar crime, and political corruption. Such stories provide examples about how to resist and confront these problems in battles for social justice and democracy. For my new books I'm exploring two very different phenomena in Italy today, first, the sharp increase in cases of femminicidio, the killing of women, often by their husbands, male partners, ex-husbands, and ex-boyfriends, as linked to cultural and social attitudes and behaviors, and represented in the media, literature, and film. While researching this topic, I narrowed to focus to the problem of the hundreds of little girls and women killed at the hands of the four major mafias in Italy, the Camorra, Cosa Nostra, the 'Ndrangheta, and the Sacra Corona Unita (United Sacred Crown). The life stories of these victims are reconstructed in the public access book Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018. It is available at the link https://dc.uwm.edu/freita_facbooks/2/. I'm also exploring the ways members of the Italian generation of digital natives are developing and living "multi-local" identities, as they reject notions of national identity and rootedness, and move fluidly as locals between one country and another, fully enjoying the different cuisines, languages, cultures, and relationships. For pure pleasure, I continue to indulge in reading every evening, and alternate between psychological thrillers, such as those by Mo Hayder, Fred Vargas, and Patricia Highsmith, and novels by my favorite Italian authors, such as Elsa Morante, Melania Mazzucco, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli and Dacia Maraini. I also enjoy the noir, and for pleasure did the English translation of the novel Il sospetto (Suspicion) by Laura Grimaldi, known in Italy as the queen of crime.
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