The Story of My Purity

Description

Straight out of Rome, one of the funniest and boldest new voices in European literary fiction Thirty years old and trapped in a sexless marriage, Piero Rosini decides to dedicate his life to Jesus. Moving to an unfinished housing development in Rome he throws himself into his work at an ultraconservative Catholic publishing house, editing works which attack modern life's decadence- including a book claiming that Pope John Paul II was secretly Jewish. Yet still Piero is suffocating. He worries that The Jewish Pope might be taking things too far. He can't get his beautiful sister-in-law out of his head. Can his purity really survive temptation?

Francesco Pacifico has written for a number of Italian publications, including Rolling Stone and GQ, and has translated into Italian the works of Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dave Eggers, Will Eisner, and more. He lives in Rome. Stephen Twilley is associate editor at the online review Public Books and assistant editor at New York Review Books Classics. He is also the translator of Marina Mander's novel The First True Lie (2013).

A rich and surprising, bright and liberal novel, dense with stories and even courageous, because of the topics it deals with and the profound lightness with which it deals with them * Rolling Stone * Pacifico has an uber-literary horizon which is as classical as it is experimental * Vogue Italia * The Story of My Purity manages to be both absurd and sincere; it is impossible to resist Piero Rosini's precise narration of his struggle to be a saint as he endures so many earthly temptations. A joy to read' -- Dana Spiotta