Dario Fo Books In Order

Novels

  1. Francis, The Holy Jester (2009)
  2. The Pope’s Daughter (2015)

Collections

  1. Female Parts (1981)
  2. A Woman Alone & Other Plays (1991)
  3. Fo Plays: 1 (1992)
  4. Fo Plays: 2 (1994)
  5. Ends and Beginnings (1994)
  6. Pope and the Witch / First Miracle of the Baby Jesus (1996)
  7. Peasants’ Bible / Story of the Tiger (2005)

Plays

  1. We Can’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! (1979)
  2. The Open Couple (1984)
  3. Trumpets and Raspberries (1987)
  4. Archangels Don’t Play Pinball (1987)
  5. Elizabeth, Almost By Chance a Woman (1987)
  6. About Face (1989)
  7. Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1990)
  8. The Tricks of the Trade (1991)
  9. The Pope and the Witch (1993)
  10. Abducting Diana (1994)
  11. Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas (2001)
  12. Low Pay? Don’t Pay! (2010)
  13. More Tricks of the Trade (2016)

Non fiction

  1. Theatre Workshops (1990)
  2. Master Breasts (1998)
  3. My First Seven Years (2005)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Dario Fo Books Overview

A Woman Alone & Other Plays

‘The pieces are comic, grotesque, on purpose. First of all because we women have been crying for two thousand years. So let’s laugh now, even at ourselves.’ Franca Rame ‘Escaping domestic servitude to enjoy free love; the assault on body and spirit of a gang rape; the joys and vicissitudes of a day and a night on the razzle: in the skillful hands of Gillian Hanna, who also translates Franca Rame and Daria Fo’s sparkling plays, this becomes the dramatic stuff of women’s lives.’ Ann McFerran, Time Out Edited by Stuart Hood and translated by: Gillian Hanna, who performed a selection of pieces to great critical acclaim at the Half Moon Theatre, London in 1989; Ed Emery, political activist and translator of Fo’s Mistero Buffo; and Christopher Cairns, Italianist and Reader in Italian Drama, at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Fo Plays: 1

Fo Plays: 1 contains some of the playwright’s best work, including: Mistero Buffo, a work based on research into medieval mystery plays; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which concerns the ‘accidental’ or not death of an anarchist railwork who ‘fell’ or was pushed to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; and Trumpets and Raspberries, a play in which the boss of Italy’s biggest car manufacturer, FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.

The volume also contains two of Fo’s previously unpublished short farces: The Virtuous Burglar and One was Nude and One Wore Tails.

Dario Fo is Italy’s leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires.

Fo Plays: 2

Dario Fo ‘gives even the wildest gags a political flavor.’ Guardian Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!: ‘This is no gloomy agitprop. Fo faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed.’ Financial Times Elizabeth: ‘Portrays our last Tudor monarch in Fo’s characteristically rollicking vein…
A triumph for Gillian Hanna as a translator.’ Financial Times The Open Couple and An Ordinary Day, written with Franca Rame, deal wittily with the fate of women in a society shaped by men.

Pope and the Witch / First Miracle of the Baby Jesus

Two plays by one of Europe’s greatest comic writers.

Peasants’ Bible / Story of the Tiger

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dario Fo is one of the world’s most important contemporary playwrights, forging subversive wit and unusual linguistic experimentation into a comedy of complete originality. The Peasants’ Bible is a collection of five monologues drawn from Italian folklore but filtered through Fo’s delightfully singular lens for example, an Adam and Eve who are passionately entwined like peas in a pod; a race between two clas*ses of men struggling for power that resembles the legend of the Hare and the Tortoise to form a Bible of the common man. In The Story of the Tiger, we find a Fourth Army soldier injured fighting Chiang Kai shek’s army, saved from starvation by being suckled by an enormous tiger, who then comes back to defeat Kai shek by using model tigers in combat. Together the pieces are an extraordinary addition to Fo’s body of work.

We Can’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

In the words of his translator, Ron Jenkins: ‘The Nobel committee’s decision to honor Fo as a master of literature is a historic tribute to the theatre, which is still viewed by many as literature’s bast*ard child; it is also the first time that the Nobel for the literary arts has been awarded to an actor. This courageous and controversial choice indirectly expands the modern definition of literature to include the power of the spoken word.’

Volume One includes:
We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!
Elizabeth
Archangels Don’t Play Pinball
About Face

Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Now part of the canon of Italian plays, Morte accidentale di un anarchico, in its original form as a subversive piece of political theatre. Based on the events of December 1969 when Guiseppe Pinelli, the anarchist, ‘fell’ to his death from a fourth floor window of the police headquarters in Milan, where he was being held for questioning in connection with the bomb in Pialla Fontana. This edition sets the play in its historical and political context and introduces readers to Fo’s political thought and theatrical practice. The text has been edited for sixth form and university students but will be useful to anyone who wants to read a salient text of the period with the help of notes and vocabulary.

The Tricks of the Trade

Clown, political activist, playwright, actor: Dario Fo is an unclassifiable genius of the modern theatre. In his ‘mini manual for actors,’ Fo lays bare the tools of his craft. With the assistance of his wife, playwright Franca Rame, he explains how text, song, humor, mime and political intelligence can be fused into brilliant ‘popular theatre.’

Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas

Winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature, Dario Fo is one of the world’s most important contemporary playwrights, forging subversive comedy, clowning, unusual linguistic experimentation, and brilliant playwriting into a comedy of complete originality. In a first person monologue that bends and mutates language and historical fact, Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas is a brilliant, vividly imagined retelling of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America. Told by a last minute conscript assigned to clean the shipboard pig stalls, who goes on to be adopted by a tribe of Indians and help them fight conquistadors, it posits a riotous alternate history in which the dynamics between native and white, male and female, history and comedy are never what they seem.

Master Breasts

The most revealing look at breasts. Photographs of breasts are everywhere: in museums, on book covers, in fashion ads, and on posters. Alluring symbols of womanhood, breasts have fascinated generations of image makers. Here, for the first time between two covers, is the breast in photography: the titillating breast, the maternal breast, the aging breast, and the symbolic breast. In Master Breasts, darkly witty political images of the 1970s jostle for space with Edward Weston’s classic nudes; Nan Goldin’s friends share pages with Robert Mapplethorpe’s gorgeously sculptured models. From Alfred Stieglitz’s classic studies of Georgia O’Keeffe to Mary Ellen Mark’s vivid documentary portraits, they are all here. Other artists include Cindy Sherman, Imogen Cunningham, and Sally Mann. A witty and reflective Introduction from the acclaimed novelist and essayist Francine Prose further links the images, while a monologue from Karen Finley’s recent performance piece American Chestnut, ‘The Detective,’ reveals a young girl’s anguish about breast inspired catcalls and jokes and then sardonically calls for similar cultural treatment of the male anatomy. Finally, in Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo’s radically funny play The Story of the Tiger, the benefits of breast feeding are celebrated as never before.

My First Seven Years

An extraordinary coming of age memoir by the Nobel Prize winning playwright My First Seven Years is Dario Fo’s fantastic, enchanting memoir of his youth spent in Northern Italy on the shores of Lago Maggiore. As a child, Fo grew up in a picturesque village teeming with glass blowers, smugglers and storytellers. Of his teenage years, Fo recounts the struggles of the Fascists and Partisans, the years of World War II, and his own tragicomic experience trying to desert the Fascist army. In a series of colorful vignettes, Fo draws us into a remarkable early life filled with characters and anecdotes that would become the inspiration for his own creative genius.

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