New York, 2008. The 23-year-old protagonist has left Italy, going abroad to study photography. To make ends meet he is a go-go boy in Alphabet City nightclubs and a nude model for second-rate artists, spending much of his free time on Craigslist looking for rooms to rent and disposable sex. It is there that she meets Louis, aka Lou, an unruly man who spends his days in a small house built in a tree outside of town, reading fantasy books. The two, after an inconstant and fleeting dating spree, decide to move in together, and as they try to make ends meet with their respective dreams and disillusionments, they scrape by as best they can: Lou by finding work in a bizarre tanning salon open twenty-four hours a day, the protagonist in an Italian pizzeria. Imprisoned in a dark and self-destructive mutual obsession, theirs becomes a story of stealing around Manhattan supermarkets and sleepless nights, of dangerous gambling and marksmanship, of punches in the face and diners that, in the absence of places to vent the last nocturnal frenzies, turn into parking lots of the soul. The outcome, hopelessly devastating, seems to suggest the idea that one must plunge into the deepest abyss to come to terms with one’s integrity. (Source: Ibs.co.uk)
is an Italian writer
