Beginnings

Antonio Moresco was born in Mantua and lives in Milan. Considered one of the founders of modern Italian literature, The Beginnings is his second book to be published by Deep Vellum, after Clandestinity, a collection of short stories. He has gone on to publish several more books, among them the short novel La cipolla (The Onion), the autobiographical Lettere a nessuno (Letters to No One), and Distant Light, which was published by Archipelago in 2013.Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. His translation of Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh was one of the most anticipated English-language titles of 2025. Max is also currently working on or has plans to translate works by Antonio Moresco, Stefano D’Arrigo, Alberto Laiseca, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eduard Limonov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Miquel de Palol. His first novel Progress is coming out with Verso in 2027. His translations have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s, The Baffler, The White Review, and Joyland. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn’t writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music.

“A towering absurdist work.” —Publisher's Weekly“A hypnotic and dreamlike book, punctuated by moments of effervescent clarity.” —Chicago Review of Books“Shifting beneath the reader’s feet, The Beginnings is a vertiginous, feverishly compelling work, offering a feast of surreal imagery and inventive language to those who approach it patiently.” —Brock Covington“The prose of The Beginnings is a camouflage that wants nothing more intensely than to fully reveal itself in all of its disruptive possibilities.” —COM-POSIT“Moresco was asking the question every writer should be asking themselves: How can I invent a language to describe my reality?” —Harold Rogers“The Beginnings achieves something of considerable difficulty, and something deeply liberating, in times in which explanatory writing, philosophical and existential musings risk to be re-branded as escapism for adults: he manages to build a deeply philosophical book through the sheer energy of literary presentation.” —Reading in Translation“A major writer of contemporary Italian literature . . . an epic of the individual in search of vocation in an elusive universe.” —Le Temps“Explosive. And masterful.” —Le Matricule des Anges“Between the quest for self and the search for possible salvation, there is the path, the effacement of oneself to be reborn to oneself: few texts allow for this almost mystical experience, this brush with the very essence of things. Antonio Moresco could have remained in this silence where he felt `at ease.’ We should be grateful that he did not.” —Lire“One of the most original voices in contemporary Italian literature.” —Mare Nostrum“The Beginnings has one of the damndest narrative voices I’ve come across in some time. It pulled me along—no doubt due in no small part to Max Lawton’s translation—wanting to know more. Even though at no particular point in the narrative could I say to myself, Oh, I get it now.” —The Book Beat