You, Naughty Mum!
A truly varied and innovative collection, branded Lucio Angelini. Next to apparently traditional fairy tales, in which the author had fun practicing the so-called “reversal of the reader's expectations” (You, Naughty Mum!, for example, very enjoyable even by an adult audience), we find ironic reinterpretations of famous fairy tales (Whitedwarf and the Seven Snows) or fairy tales in which the real and the surreal intertwine in a particularly liberating mix (in Inside Oronzo’s Big Head, the child Oronzo takes revenge in a totally unpredictable way for the pedagogical sadism of his teacher). Particularly interesting are some “meta-tales”, in which the author does not hesitate to highlight typical “ingredients” or “clichés” or “construction mechanisms” of traditional fairy tales.
Lucio Angelini
As he wrote in one of his Italian novels (Il fantasma di Andersen): “The most striking episode of my childhood was when the ghost of a tall, slouching boy with a big nose appeared to me: Hans Christian Andersen.” Born in Fano, Italy, but living in Venice, Lucio Angelini is a translator of novels and essays for major Italian publishers (Einaudi, Mondadori, Frassinelli, Fazi, and others) and a writer. He translated into Italian Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Gandhi, Einstein, Tobias Wolff, Lewis Carroll and others, including Patricia Cornwell’s Body of Evidence (Oggetti di reato, Mondadori). He also translated into Italian three novels by Hans Christian Andersen: Only a Fiddler, O.T. – A Danish Novel, The Two Baronesses. As a writer, he has written mainly short stories for children and young adults. His collection You, Naughty Mum! (And Other Tales)(Quella bruttacattiva della mamma!, Emme Edizioni) was translated into French with the title Méchante Maman (Flammarion). In 2013, he published in Italy The Chinese Gondolier (Il gondoliere cinese), an environmentalist noir for adults, in support of the campaign for the expulsion of giant cruise ships from the Venetian lagoon.
