Minor Bodies
Translated by Alice Whitmore
Overview
Minor is the desiring body that runs, rises, gravitates towards larger, brighter, more dazzling bodies, that bestows on other bodies the status of suns and planets, fires to be orbited, the reason for everything. There is no center of the universe except the one we invent for ourselves.
Jonathan is twenty years old, gay, and full of life. He’s set out to escape the insignificance of his suburban home, to give himself instead and forever to the real city, Milan, where he hopes also to find love.
But when Jonathan finds love in all its messy, complicated, sexy reality, he realizes it’s not enough. He has escaped the place and people of his childhood, but can he escape the man raised by those people and in that place, the man he has grown up to be?
The much-anticipated second book by Jonathan Bazzi, the Italian author of the multi-award winning Fever, Minor Bodies is a striking autobiographical novel, a delicious, captivating portrait of love and infatuation: “A self-inflicted lightning bolt, only heavy, joyless — more like a fist, or a hammer.”
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 5.1in x 7.8in
- 336 pages
- 9781957363769
- USD$18.00
- 6 October 2026
- World English
- Sosia & Pistoia
Categories
Praise
Praise for Fever:
“Bazzi captures the longing, the wounds, and the joys of growing up queer and working class in 1980s Milan—and what it means to recalibrate your world amid the aftershocks of a life-changing diagnosis. I read it in a single sitting.”
Praise for Fever:
“Jonathan Bazzi’s Fever promises to shed light on something quite specific, but ends up illuminating infinitely more. Here, in direct and unapologetic prose, brilliantly translated by Alice Whitmore, we are immersed in one man’s inner battle to assimilate an HIV diagnosis, yet we are never allowed to lose sight of the wider circumstances that give this battle its distinct emotional configuration: a deprived upbringing, an ill-equipped mother, a neo-fascist father, a suburban wasteland filled with wounded personalities, a precarious livelihood in a modern city, a treacherous online environment, a traumatized queer community, a politically dysfunctional nation. Shifting between anger and rebellion, on the one hand, and tenderness and forgiveness, on the other, Fever grips us first, then terrifies us, then moves us, then urges us, finally, to consider the question, ‘Who gets to be well, and why, and how?”
About the Author
Jonathan Bazzi was born in Milan in 1985. They have written for various newspapers and magazines, including Gay.it, Vice, and The Vision. Their first novel, Fever, was hailed as a significant addition to queer literature and won the Sila, Premio Opera Prima, Edoardo Kihlgren, and Bagutta literary prizes.
Translator
Alice Whitmore is a writer and literary translator living on Eastern Maar country. Her translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence was awarded the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize.
