Wu Ming Foundation: A Bird's Eye View. Biography and RSS aggregator

For those who like shortcuts, this lens provides a bird's eye view of all the news, updates and entries in all languages on the Wu Ming Foundation official website.

Per chi apprezza le scorciatoie: questa lente fornisce una veduta a volo d'uccello di tutte le novità, gli aggiornamenti e le integrazioni in tutte le lingue al sito ufficiale della Wu Ming Foundation.

About us

Wu Ming Foundation - Who We Are and What We Do: This page tells the story of a mysterious collective of guerrillla novelists from Italy. The tale begins from their previous militancy in a loose-knit cultural network named after a Black soccer player.
If you want to find info on the Wu Ming Foundation and the Luther Blissett Project, if you enjoyed (or hated) one of Wu Ming's novels and want to know more about the authors, if you want to write a feature article, a review, an essay, a smart blog post or comment, this is the right place to come.
Wikipedia - Luther Blissett: The multiple identity is named after the footballer Luther Blissett who used to play for A.C. Milan amongst other teams. It is particularly popular among Italian subcultural activists and artists, possibly because of the Milan connection. The reasons why the group chose the name are unclear to mainstream journalists (e.g. the BBC suggested that Blissett, one of the first black footballers to play in Italy, may have been chosen to make a statement against right-wing extremists in the country).
Wikipedia - Wu Ming: Wu Ming (extended name: Wu Ming Foundation) is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna.
Wikipedia - The Novel Q: Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. The novel is set in Europe during the 16th century, and deals with Protestant reformation movements.
Wikipedia - The Novel 54: 54 is a novel by Wu Ming first published in Italian in 2002. The novel is set in Italy, former Yugoslavia, Britain and the US during the year 1954.
Amapedia - The Novel 54: 54 was written in three years (1999-2001) by the same collective of Italian authors that wrote the novel Q in the 1995-98 period. According to the authors, they chose 1954 - twelve months at the height of the Cold War - as the novel's historical backdrop because that year was full of crucial events that would shape the world to come.

Luther Blissett and Wu Ming books on Amazon.com

Q

by: Luther Blissett

From Q's Amazon ProductWiki: 'Q was published at the beginning of 1999 by the authoritative Italian publisher Einaudi. It soon became a best seller, and in a few months influenced the culture of the new wave of social movements in the aftermath of the so-called "Battle of Seattle" (November 1999).
Non-Italians have difficulties in grasping all the echoes of Italian history resonating between the lines of the book. It seems that elderly antifascist Partisans read it as an allegorical narrative of their guerrilla experience, while "soixant-huitards" (former 1960's and 1970's left-wing activists) read it as an allegorical narrative of their experience. People who had volunteered social work in the Balkans during the 1990's ethnic wars acknowledged Q as a novel on that tragedy. The novel gained international success after 9/11 and the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, thus many readers took it as an indictment of religious fanaticism and the warmongering ideologues advocating a clash of civilizations. However, it appears that at least some sections of the book were conceived as coded narratives of Luther Blissett's own stunts. The authors have stated that Q is about every "cycle of struggle" [ciclo di lotte] in history, everywhere.'

Amazon Price: $10.20 (as of 11/23/2009)

54

by: Wu Ming

From 54's Amazon ProductWiki: 'Curiously enough, the inclusion of Grant in the book was due to a mistake. In the Summer of 1999 Wu Ming 2, one of the five authors, was ransacking a public newspaper library in Bologna, in order to find stories, trivia and events that took place in 1954. While leafing through a collection of gossip mags, he bumped into a "Best Actor of 1953" poll among female readers. The winner was Gary Cooper. Wu Ming 2 noted it down for future reference, but he shortened the actor's name to "C.G.". A few weeks later, during a brainstorming session, he found that hasty scrawl again, misread it for "C.G." and incorrectly recalled that the poll's winner was Cary Grant. "Why don't we put Cary Grant into the plot? Charming man, fascinating life, involved with the British intelligence during WW2... He was very popular in Italy to boot, readers of so-and-so magazine voted him Best Actor of 1953..." The other members of the band agreed and took to study Grant's movies and bio. Only a few months later they found out that Gary Cooper was the real winner of the poll. By then, Cary Grant had become one of the main characters in this multi-layered novel.'

Amazon Price: (as of 11/23/2009)

Sermon to the Princes (Revolutions)

by: Thomas Muntzer

The Reformation was originally an attack on a corrupt Church, sparked by Martin Luther. Thomas Müntzer, originally Luther's protégé, became increasingly convinced that the Reformation did not go far enough. In 1524 he became one of the leaders ofthe Peasants' War where the struggle against the Church exploded into a revolutionary attempt to realize the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Wu Ming, the five Italian authors who, under the name of Luther Blissett, wrote the best selling novel Q about the Radical Reformation, ask why Müntzer has inspired radicals for almost 500 years.

Amazon Price: $10.85 (as of 11/23/2009)

Manituana

by: Wu Ming

A bloody historical epic of exodus and return, torn loyalties and desperate battles, Manituana spans the Atlantic, from the forests of America's northeast to the underworld of eighteenth-century London. The authors' collective Wu Ming have created a genre-breaking reimagining of the American Civil War. A story from the wrong side of history.
1775 - The conflict between the British Empire and the American colonies erupts in all-out war. Rebels and loyalists to the British Crown compete for an alliance with the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the most powerful Indian confederation, with a constitution hundreds of years old. In the Mohawk River Valley, Native Americans and colonists have co-existed for generations. But as the thunder of war approaches and the nascent United States struggles violently to be born, old bonds are broken, friends and families are split by betrayal and this mixed community lapses into hatred and resentment. To save his threatened world, the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant makes a painful decision. Setting off with a group of warriors, he goes beyond the world he has always known in a restless journey that will take him from New York to the salons of Georgian London at the heart of the British Empire, knowing that the road back will be paved with war.

Amazon Price: $18.44 (as of 11/23/2009)

Wu Ming Foundation Blog (English)

Since April 2009. Humbly and methodically.

we weren't able to properly run our English language newsletter, and we never had the time and energy to regularly update [aren't we good at splitting infinitives?] the English section of our main website. We had to stop editing the newsletter, and now we want to start over - slowly, humbly and methodically [help, we got hooked up on adverbs!]. This new blog is one of the tools that should help us in this task, at least we hope so.