La notte più bella

New York, 9 November 1965, 5.27 p.m. Suddenly, everything shuts off. The city that never sleeps comes to a stop. Everything is shrouded in darkness. For several long minutes, you can only hear the horns of frightened drivers honking incessantly. Then the darkness is joined by silence and everyone finds themselves contending with the unknown, mystery and fear, aided only by the light of a bright, clear moon. There’s Nathan, a young man with Mohawk ancestry, who has to return to the reservation to his grandfather, Feathered Elk; there’s Stephanie, a young skater, who is crossing Central Park and meets Lee when she stops on a bench to wait for light; there’s a veteran who has just received a letter from JFK that has been unanswered for two years; there’s a homeless man who loves books and a young woman who fights for equality; there’s a group who’ve escaped from a girls’ orphanage to go dancing for the first time; there’s a boy hoping to get Spiderman’s powers to take on the bullies at school; there are a grandmother and granddaughter who go to visit the cemetery and will actually be able to meet their loved ones again for a time; and then there’s Neil, who spreads Nana Edna’s long blanket from his roof to the moon. La notte più bella (the most wonderful night) is a collection of eight short stories spanning the great New York blackout of 1965, caused by the failure of the power plant near Niagara Falls. Over the course of the book, Daniela Palumbo outlines the various facets of the United States of the sixties: an era poised between the war in Vietnam and hippy counterculture, between the conquest of the Moon, the Indian reservations and Martin Luther King, between Kennedy and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Eight stories within history intertwine fiction and reality, linking together the great moments that have marked contemporary American life and the personal events that characterize each one of our lives: the birth of a love, a return to origins, the search for one’s place in the world.  

La notte più bella
by Daniela Palumbo
Il Battello a Vapore, 2023