Wu Ming will be at Bluestockings Bookstore on FRIDAY, November 20th to present Manituana, their latest book to be translated into the English.
It was written in the 2003-07 period and published in Italy in 2007. It is the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which the authors call “the Atlantic Triptych”. All novels will be set in the 1770s, all across the Atlantic Ocean (North America, Europe, the West Indies and Africa), before and during the American Revolution. A story from the wrong side of history, when everything was still possible. In 1775, at the dawn of the revolution that gave birth to the United States of America, British loyalists and rebels compete for an alliance with the Six Nations of the Iroquois. The Iroquois, the most powerful indigenous tribal group in the Mohawk River Valley, with a constitution hundreds of years old, have coexisted with the colonists for generations. Now they must make a painful decision that gravely endangers the future of their mixed community. Together, English and Indian representatives of that community undertake a long voyage to London, capital of the British Empire, knowing that the road back will be paved with war.
Wu Ming (extended name: Wu Ming Foundation) is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. In their pre-Wu Ming days, the group wrote the novel Q (first edition 1999). Unlike the open name “Luther Blissett”, “Wu Ming” stands for a defined group of writers active in literature and popular culture. The band authored several novels, some of which have been translated in many countries. Their books are seen as part of a body of literary works (the “nebula”, as it is frequently called in Italy) described as the New Italian Epic, a phrase that was proposed by Wu Ming themselves.