GIADA SCODELLARO was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. Her debut collection from Dorothy Project, Some of Them Will Carry Me—hailed as “stunning” (Renee Gladman) and “riveting, brilliant” (Alexandra Kleeman)—was one of The New Yorker best books of 2022.
Centered on six women sharing a space in a derelict apartment tower and set in what may be the future, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its sweep, wit, and the sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, powered along by snatches of speech. “The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” Using the lenses of urban infrastructure, botany, folklore, choreography, and collective listening, Ruins, Child creates a new ethnography of place and an ode both to
communal ruins and to resistance. In the vivacity of their telling, Scodellaro’s heroines obscure authority, setting afoot a radical freeing-up. “Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.”
Giada Scodellaro is one of the most astonishing writers of her generation and Ruins, Child is a visionary novel. Scodellaro refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience. The result is a masterpiece that lives and breathes on the page, every sentence shimmering with wit, musicality, brilliance and verve.
Her prose makes the borders of genre feel irrelevant… What matters is Scodellaro’s exhilarating freedom of mind.
The female protagonists who appear in Scodellaro’s kinetic début collection of stories find themselves in absurdist and fantastical scenarios that interrogate the nature of subjectivity.
A stunning debut.
Readers encountering this extraordinary book for the first time will rejoice.
Riveting, evocative, written with intensity and purpose, these potent, self-contained fictions have a vitality all their own—and they announce the arrival of a brilliant new voice in literature.
