Amsterdam – Sicilian actor, director and writer Luigi Lo Cascio will be at the Italian Cultural Institute in Amsterdam on October 1 at 7 p.m. to present his latest book, Storielle per granchi e scorpioni, published by Feltrinelli. Drawing on a literary tradition that stretches from Landolfi to Buzzati and from Kafka to Borges, Lo Cascio confirms his talent as a writer by giving voice to our deepest fears and smallest obsessions, stripping them bare and taking them to extremes until they become paradoxical and grotesque – or, at times, lyrical and moving. Calling them “little stories” is a serious matter – just as games are always serious. Beneath the book’s humour, the stories invite readers to reflect while constantly playing with them, just as the title suggests: they catch the reader off guard, shift their perspective by lifting them out of everyday life or, conversely, pushing them into the folds of ordinary days and inviting them to examine them under a microscope. These are philosophical stories, in other words, but ones to be “handled with care”. Much like Mr Crab and Mr Scorpion, using their claws as they converse about literature, Lo Cascio’s characters condemn humanity’s habit of writing only about humans, opening up the possibilities of storytelling to every realm: animal, mineral and vegetal, with the remarkable addition of the spectral – the realm of ghosts. What follows is a rich succession of stories about people, but also about cats and bacteria, flies that eat sofas, conspiracies involving ashes and the ghosts of soldiers who fell in battle. (9colonne)