Let the Games Begin

Niccolo Ammaniti

ago 2013 · Text Publishing

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A perfectly timed political satire from the internationally bestselling author of I'm Not Scared and Me and You.

It is the most decadent party of the century. A nouveau riche real estate magnate has planned a lavish weekend for a who's-who of celebrities: starlets, politicians, soccer stars and intellectuals. Among them is a neurotically charming author struggling to write his next book and hoping to rejuvenate his reputation.

In an unexpected turn of events, he crosses paths with the Wilde Beasts of Abaddon, a satanic sect planning to ruin the evening's festivities and become celebrated as a world-famous cult. What was intended as the most lavish spectacle of the year quickly descends into chaos.

Let the Games Begin, international best-selling author Niccolo Ammaniti fuses a riotous dose of absurdity with a clear-eyed critique of the superficiality and vulgarity of modern culture. Let the Games Begin may well be, as Italian left-wing daily L'Unita remarked, 'the print version of La Dolce Vita for the present day.'

Niccolo Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He has written two collections of short stories and six novels, four of which have been translated into English. He was the youngest ever winner of the Italian Viareggio Literary Prize for Fiction for his best-selling novel I'm Not Scared, which has been translated into thirty-five languages. The Crossroads received the Premio Strega Prize in 2007, Italy's equivalent to the Booker Prize.

'Ammaniti writes about an Italy you don't read about in the travel books.' Sunday Telegraph

'A young novelist with extraordinary narrative gifts.' Australian

'Niccolo Ammaniti is the best novelist of his generation.' Il Giornale

'A brilliantly perverse comic triumph...Unpredictable, witty and very black.' West Australian

'Exuberant, erratic satire of consumption of corruption...A lot of the laughs are verbal, and Kylee Doust's crisp translation seems to have rendered them neatly.' Weekend Herald

'The chaos that descends is at times shocking, but always thought-provoking, in this absurdists romp through modern culture.' Limelight

'Seeming absurdities, outrageous situations and human follies are piled one on top of the other with a ghoulish humour that never fails...This is a novel pointing a deliciously blood-soaked finger, ever sexually resuscitant, yet shaking from alcohol overload, at the rest of 21st-century decadence around the globe.' Otago Daily Times

'This book pulls off a rare feat: an action-packed but well-paced satire populated with characters rather than caricatures.' Publishers Weekly

'Let the Games Begin reads like an intellectual's beach-read: romantic, full of plot and characters, but also teeming with ideas, symbols, dense metaphors, and complex satire.' Vol. 1 Brooklyn

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Niccolò Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He has written two collections of short stories and six novels, four of which have been translated into English. He was the youngest ever winner of the Italian Viareggio Literary Prize for Fiction for his best-selling novel I'm Not Scared, which has been translated into thirty-five languages. The Crossroads received the Premio Strega Prize in 2007, Italy's equivalent to the Booker Prize.