Changes

''Outsiders'' is a collection of six pieces of writing by Italian authors. The pieces have been collated from a supplement to an Italian daily newspaper supplement and six have been chosen around the theme of outsiders for translation into English. Thus, the pieces themselves were not written around this specific theme but have rather had this theme imposed on them in this collection. Since the outsider is often used in various forms by writers to observe the status quo, this is not a big leap of imagination.

There is a clear Italian theme here, both in the obvious nationality of the authors but also in the subject matter, which gives an interesting insight into the cultural view of the Italian writers. There are one of or two issues that, in my opinion, let the collection down slightly but overall, it's a strong collection with one or two really terrific pieces of writing.

The stand out piece in the collection for me is by the intriguing writers' collective known as Wu Ming, which looks at an Italian academic's involvement in the rights of an American cheese manufacture manufacturer to use the term Parmesan and particularly the designation ''Parmigiano Reggiano'' which leads him to some interesting discoveries. It's a story that could easily be extended to full novel form even though it works nicely as a short story here. Here the academic is an outsider both from the legal wrangles and as an Italian in America. It's a story that you could imagine [[:Category:David Mitchell |David Mitchell]] having written.