Pubblicare Pynchon in Italia: percorsi, protagonisti, prospettive

The essay aims at reconstructing the processes that led to the publication and circulation of Thomas Pynchon’s works in Italy from the mid-1960s to the present day, so as to shed light on the fragmented and distorted reception of Pynchon’s corpus between the 1980s and the 2000s. The first section examines the organization of Bompiani publishing house in the 1960s and 1970s, as Pynchon’s early Italian reception was tied to the publisher’s policies. The second section focuses on the translation of V. by Liana Burgess, which Pynchon himself appreciated. The last section summarizes the subsequent Italian critical reception of Pynchon, conditioned by the general reorganization of the publishing industry affecting both Europe and the United States.