A revised, updated, Italian version of my cultural history of coffee consumption with a focus on interwar stovetop coffee makers like the Bialetti Moka Express just came out with the LUISS University Press in Rome. The book is accompanied by a new afterword which reflects critically on the economic viability of the “made in Italy” model. But the core of the book assumes the form of an account of how the autarchic cult of national…
 
Read more

Novels are not just extended narratives bound and printed in codex form. They are also gateways to imaginative worlds that are constructed not just on the page but on a backstage composed of the sorts of materials that abound in archives: marked up source books, maps, reference tools, diagrams and drawings, paper slips, notes to self and others, inventories, rough and not-so-rough drafts. Umberto Eco’s 1994 novel The Island of the Day Before is one…
 
Read more