Join us Wednesday, October 28 at 7 PM for a discussion of The Twenty Days of Turin a novel by Giorgio De Maria. The meeting will be held in person or online via Zoom link sent on the day of the meeting.
The Reading group meets monthly except for December to discuss world literature in translation. If you’d like to recieve notifications send us your name and email and we’ll add you to the list. Reading group books are discounted 15% from Book Beat and are in stock now.
The Twenty Days of Turin
Giorgio De Maria
Translated by Ramon Glazov
The Twenty Days of Turin begins ten years after a mysterious period of mass insomnia, unexplained murders, and collective psychosis that gripped the city. An unnamed researcher begins investigating what happened, only to discover that Turin’s past may not be as safely buried as everyone would like to believe.
And then there’s the Library: an institution where people deposit their diaries, thoughts, complaints, fantasies, and private writings, which strangers can pay to read. The promise is connection. The result is something considerably darker.
“The prospect of ‘being read’ quivered in the distance like an enchanting mirage.”
Written in 1975 and first published in Italy in 1977, the novel has attracted attention for its uncanny anticipation of blogs, online forums, and social media. But The Twenty Days of Turin is more than a prediction of the internet. It is a surreal literary horror story about isolation, voyeurism, collective fear, memory, and the things a city—or a society—would rather not remember.
What the reviewers say
“This is a book written in 1975 … yet it grasps the implications of social media in ways cyberpunk never did.”
— Peter Berard, Los Angeles Review of Books
“No Gibson, no Sterling, no cyberpunk or spec-fic scribbler of the ’80s or ’90s ever captured the poisoned zeitgeist of social media better than this.”
— Jason Sheehan, NPR
“De Maria’s reality in The Twenty Days of Turin is necessarily askance; even when he’s giving you what appears a natural bit of realism, something is skewed, something sinister, something other.”
— William Giraldi, Commonweal
About the Author
Giorgio De Maria (1924–2009) was an Italian musician, critic, and novelist whose work achieved global cult status decades after its initial publication. Born in Turin, he co-founded the avant-garde music collective Cantacronache in 1958 alongside intellectuals like Italo Calvino, creating politically charged folk music. He is best remembered for his 1977 dystopian horror masterpiece, The Twenty Days of Turin, written during Italy’s turbulent “Years of Lead.” The novel gained widespread modern acclaim following its 2017 English translation, with critics celebrating it as a stunningly prophetic allegory for the voyeurism, isolation, and collective rage of the social media age.