Linguality Launches Italian Book Club

Business Wire, May 21, 2008

American Readers Now Have Access to Contemporary Italian Bestsellers with Parallel Italian-English Glossaries

ROME -- "It's the literary equivalent of a subtitled movie!" exclaimed former Italian Minister of Cultural Heritage and renowned author Walter Veltroni after seeing the first selection in Linguality's Italian Book Club. Linguality, an American publisher of special annotated editions of bestselling European fiction and nonfiction, places the original foreign-language text on every right-hand page, and an extensive glossary on the opposite page. The company's Italian series was launched in April, on the heels of its successful French Book Club, which debuted in May 2007.

Readers passionate about Italy sign up to receive a new Italian title every other month for a year. Veltroni was examining Linguality's annotated edition of Susanna Tamaro's blockbuster Va' dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart). His own novel, La scoperta dell'alba (The Discovery of the Dawn), is slated to be the second book in the series, followed by Fabrizio Blini's Mamma Mia!. Works by other leading authors include Nel momento (In an Instant) by Andrea De Carlo, L'Orda (The Hoard) by Gian Antonio Stella, and Giovanni Arpino's Il buio e il miele (The Darkness and the Honey).

Rome-based series editor Lisa R. Tucci says the book list is an impressive one. "We went to Italian publishers with copies of our French books. All of them were extremely impressed and jumped at the opportunity to make their original texts available to non-native readers. For them, we've created an exciting new publishing paradigm. As a result, we were able to license some of the most successful fiction to come out of Italy in the last couple of decades."

Linguality's publisher, Wes Green, launched the company in early 2007 with Paris-based language-acquisition expert Dr. Gerald Honigsblum, the former director of Boston University's overseas French program. "The idea was to make some of the best contemporary European fiction and nonfiction accessible to people with limited or rusty language skills," says Green. "With all the difficult words and expressions defined on the opposite pages, a non-fluent speaker doesn't need a complete translation...or a dictionary. He or she just opens the book and starts reading in the foreign language."

The original French series proved so successful, work began almost immediately on an Italian equivalent. The titles of the company's next six French books will be announced in June.

In addition to their benefits for language learners, the book clubs have been a welcome boon to European publishers. Relatively few foreign-language titles are ever translated into English. The company, which advertises its titles in a number of major national magazines and newspapers, hopes many more Americans will become aware of the quality of contemporary European writing.

"What [Linguality] is doing is 'molto bella'," says Veltroni. "Helping people read [books] in Italian, with simply a key to those 'grey areas,' seems to me to be excellent-- even socially correct. It's a totally different reading experience."

About Linguality

Linguality licenses recent French and Italian fiction and nonfiction titles from leading European publishing houses and republishes them in the original language with an extensive English lexicon on each facing page. All Linguality titles also come with author interviews on audio CD. The books are sold by subscription direct-to-buyer through the company's website: www.linguality.com. Subscribers include international executives, professionals, schools, and libraries worldwide.