A new Kindle ebook of 239 pages, just published, surveys Italian Sword & Sorcery: La via Italiana all’heroic fantasy. It’s in Italian, and appears to be from independent scholars. Here’s the blurb translated and tweaked…

Francesco La Manno, aided by Annarita Guarnieri, aims to outline the boundaries of sword and sorcery. The lead essay makes an analysis of the core constituent elements of sword and sorcery. It does this firstly by an examination of the main characters of heroic fantasy as crafted by the Master of Cross Plains (Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and James Allison); then through a survey of the cycles of Clark Ashton Smith (Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne and Zothique) and Thongor of Lemuria by Lin Carter; then a look at some recent commercialisations of the genre. Finally, there is a survey of ‘the new heroic Mediterranean fantasy’ and its [bishops = authors and curators?]. The volume also contains essays by Adriano Monti Buzzetti, Gianfranco de Turris, Mario Polia and Paolo Paron.