Editor’s Preface

“The supreme vice is Shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.” You all agree with Wilde, I hope. You would also be if this search to realize life … to let oneself be driven by those “invisible forces” vastly greater than ourselves that we generally call “passions” and to which we relentlessly must and, why not, want to surrender … leads us to ruin and, in the worse of cases, to suicide? Okay, there are a billion possible outcomes in the middle, but the number drops drastically when fate takes a hand … and sometimes very little intervention is enough.

            A lie and the truth recorded on an answering machine arrive too late. This could be enough to indelibly mark the lives of four youths who, like you, refuse to give in to shallowness, to be swallowed up by nothing.

            Kevin has no choice. Yet he tried to save himself when, too consumed and tired even of himself, he returned to Brian waving a white flag.

            Brian also has no choice--either his brother-rival or his reason for living.

            And his reason for living, the most rational creature in the story, the kindest, the counterweight to the violence and the irrationality of passions, Bamby--she is also the one forced by fate to make a cruel choice: to be crushed forever by remorse or to atone for her guilt with endless suffering.

Finally, there is Larry, perhaps the least driven of the four, the most conventional, the most “shallow”. His character was not neglected by the author, but rather, was perhaps the most well thought out.

This is not simply the typical (though still valid) story of a group of friends, each of whom has not had the time to grow, to cultivate themselves, in this problem-ridden and indifferent world. There is the captivating power of irreversibility, a wise awareness of the heart and of its passions, of human behaviour and the ability to face the most trivial moments of everyday life with irony. In addition to this, it possesses a masterful summoning of gestures and images behind which one intuits a lively literary imagination: the story was originally presented as a subject for feature film.

But now the bombshell. Are you ready?
The author wrote the book when she was only 14 years old.

Once I learned this, I immediately forgave some of the books inaccuracies; also we have to consider the fact that Alissa did not want to return to review the story, written during the period in which her father was dying.

We can truly say that we have discovered a real talent with great potential. Alissa was therefore chosen as the first author of this “New Authors” Collection. A rigorous selection, given that we rejected without hesitation more commercially viable material.