We take the title of this journal from a novella of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The novella is an existentialist piece, written before Dostoyevsky's greatest works and before Existentialism had really taken root in literature. The unnamed narrator is frequently named an anti-hero and is described by the note on the back of the Dover edition as "a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative value...

Elsa Morante’s Politics of Writing is a collected volume of twenty-one essays written by Morante specialists and international scholars. Essays gather attention on four broad critical topics, namely the relationship Morante entertained with the arts, cinema, theatre, and the visual arts; new critical approaches to her four novels; treatment of body and sexual politics; and Morante’s prophetic voice as it emerges in both her literary works and her essayistic writings. Essays focus on Elsa M...