Salvatore MARANO

It is wrapped into mist. Some say he is a composer and guitar player in a band with no tracks on record, some an Italian chess champion, some an underground poet, some an editorial consultant and some even a self-publisher. A shadow-writer profile is also suspected when he lived under a false name between London and Baltimore. He boasts to have befriended artists and writers to whom he would have extracted unpublished interviews. His research may have begun at the end of the 1980s, his past as an art and film critic. Why he relies on pen and inkstand is a mystery, since (his words) he prefers round tables to conference proceedings. He argues he deals with literature because the only truth he knows would lurk in fiction.

He would work on la littérature potentielle & writing under constraint, on art and play, the technologies of writing, the interrelations between literature and other arts — especially, the visual arts —, literature and space (from page to urban space), performance.  He would be a contributor to the RSA Journal, Italian Americana, Letterature d'America. He would have written, among others, on W. Abish, M. Atwood, D. Barnes, W. Burroughs, E.E. Cummings, H. Crane, W. Faulkner, A. Lowell, M. Loy, H. Mathews, B. Nichol, G. Perec, G. Stein, W. Stevens, Mark Twain. It seems he has translated A. Burgess, R. Kipling, B. Harte. Rumors have it that he may have published with Aracne, Biblioteca del Vascello, Bonanno, Bulzoni, ESI, Marsilio, Olskhi, Quattroventi.

Nothing is known about the alleged voluntary activities attributed to him.