Bug

Written by Giacomo Sartori

Narrated by Miles Daniel Johnson

With the wicked humor and imagination that made readers fall in love with his novel I Am God, Giacomo Sartori brings us a madcap story of family dysfunction, (dis)ability, intelligent robots, bees, and a family of misfit savants living outside the bounds.

In the singular world of the young, deaf narrator of Bug, there are just a handful of people who try to understand him when he gets into trouble at school. His father, a data analyst for Nutella whose real job is to pinpoint terrorists, is clueless about humans in real life. His brilliant brother, called IQ in public and Robin Hood in the hackersphere, has his back but is ever busier training his robot. His grandfather, a retired anarchist-guerilla-turned-nematologist, chides him for misbehaving when he takes him hunting for worms. Meanwhile, his Buddhist beekeeper mother, ordinarily his closest confidante, has been in a coma ever since a terrible car accident.

Just when the family’s survival in their converted chicken coop seems most precarious, someone—or something—new enters his life: Bug. This self-declared “fast friend” seems to know all about his family and has some creative, if not strictly legal, ideas about how to help....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Productions
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781094435756

Giacomo Sartori

The novelist, poet and dramatist Giacomo Sartori was born in 1958 in Trento in the Alpine northeast of Italy near the Austrian border. He lives in Paris. An agronomist, he is a soil specialist whose unusual day job (unusual for a writer) has shaped a distinctive concrete and poetic literary style. A prolific and sophisticated writer of fiction with a dozen volumes to his credit, Sartori took as his subject in his early novels Tritolo (TNT) and Sacrificio (Sacrifice) the stifling provincial atmosphere of the valleys of his native region and the twisted lives of its most vulnerable inhabitants. A recent novel Rogo (At the Stake), also set in the region, is written in the voices of three women from different historical periods who commit infanticide. The autofiction Anatomia della battaglia (The Anatomy of the Battle) about a young man’s effort to come to terms with and define his manhood against the model of his father, a committed Fascist, and the historical novel Cielo nero (Black Heavens), deal with fascism and its dark, persistent allure. Sartori’s shorter fiction includes the book of interrelated absurdist stories Autismi (Autisms, 2018) written in the voice of a person struggling to cope with the bizarre, baffling customs and expectations that all around him seem to share. The black humor and pessimism are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. Sartori has also published poems and plays, and he has won several Italian literary prizes. Three of his novels have been translated into French. Several stories from Autismi appeared in Frederika Randall’s English translation in Massachusetts Review last year. An excerpt from L’Anatomia della battaglia, also translated by Randall, appeared in The Arkansas International no 2.

Reviews for Bug

[Karen Chandler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Different yet it draws you in. Showsvdisabilities with school and how they treat them. You have honey bees, robots, and comas. Enjoy