What is the Milan Review?

The Milan Review is a publishing house and design studio that I founded with my friend and current Milan Review Art Director, Riccardo Trotta. It is based in Milan, but we count on the help of a few good friends in Paris, Berlin, LA and New York. We publish a semi-annual lit-mag which is also called The Milan Review, as well as stand-alone books of comics, photography, fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Some are in English, some are in Italian. We also sometimes design books for other people, as was the case with the Oma & Bella cookbook that we designed for the film director Alexa Karolinski, who is very smart and awesome.

Give me a brief history of the Milan Review.

Well, me and Riccardo both love books. I love to read them, and Riccardo loves to hold them in his hands and look at the paper they’re printed on and checking out fonts. We were both kind of stuck, creatively, at VICE Italy, where we worked together, and we needed an outlet where we could just do the things we loved. So that’s how it began. We went out one night and had pizza and planned our first issue and decided we’d make two issues a year and that sooner or later we’d move into making other books and comics and whatnot. Two years later and here we are.

What magazines inspired the creation of the Milan Review?

Quite simply: McSweeney’s. We had a fetish for the Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, and some of the stuff that Lorin Stein put out when he was at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. The FSG edition of 2666 is so gorgeous.

Are you Italian? Are you American?

I am an Anglo-Italian man who was born in Milan thirty years ago. I moved to England when I was seventeen and lived there for six years. After that I moved back to Italy, where I was the editor-in-chief of VICE’s Italian edition for seven years, during which time I also wrote a bunch of articles and essays and interviews for other magazines, curated art shows, translated a book of stories by Jim Shepard in Italian, and edited a couple of books.

Why is there an English-language literary journal coming out of Italy?

Basically, because I don’t read in Italian. I was always more Anglo, culturally, and I just can’t break the habit of reading in English. I don’t like contemporary Italian literature, but I’m sure it’s my fault and I simply lack refinement in that area.

Who is the best writer to come from Milan?

Renata Adler.

Who is the best reader to come from Milan?

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