Massimo Rizzante was born in Venice in 1963. Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Trento, he is a poet, narrator and essayist. Disciple and Italian translator of Milan Kundera, from 1992 to 1997 he was part of the "Seminar on the European Novel" conducted in Paris by the Czech writer. He is a member of the editorial staff of "L’Atelier du roman". Several of his essays and articles have appeared in «Letras Libres», in «La Tempestad» and in «Revista de la Universidad de México».
How can we face the infantocracy, the kitsch, the political correctness and the eternalized present of the infinite commonplaces that have turned literature into an ephemeral and marginal colony of show society? Claiming the right to heresy and curiosity against the biopolitical reduction of homo poeticus to homo sapiens, Massimo Rizzante tells us about his journey through history and the geography of the modern novel -from Svevo to Kafka, from Kundera to Kiš, from Borges a Bolaño- and his inexhaustible search for a destination, an inheritance and a meaning still possible. Intellectual journal and story of a learning, We are not the last intertwines autobiographical anecdotes, always subtle interpretations and sometimes unforgettable aphorisms in the plot of a reflection that represents a fundamental antidote to intelligence against contemporary bêtise.

«The beneficial shadow of Kundera's splendid lesson in The Art of the Novel glides along Rizzante's caustic reflections on the fervent cult of the author's supposed" creativity "(not creation!), Gender studies and the scoop exclusively linked to the immediacy of the present. […] Rizzante's leaps and bounds trips and his encounters […] complete this book as suggestive and rich as it is unusual and unclassifiable. On the contrary, the reader has the impression of having traveled the Journey to the Cervantes Parnassus, this time from the hands of a curious reader of the third millennium »
Juan Goytisolo

"The form of the literary essay is inspired only by the concrete work that is the object of its reflection and, since every literary work worthy of the name has its unique and inimitable problems, the form of the essay cannot but be, it too, unique and inimitable. This book by Massimo Rizzante surprisingly confirms that the art of the essay is still with us ».
Milan Kundera