Studying trade publishing implies dealing with the manifold nature of literary translations: Translated books are industrial as well as cultural products, they are works by single authors and at the same time the result of a collective effort, involving several professionals such as translators, editors, publishers, literary agents, and designers. From this perspective, one might question how, if at all, a book that is printed in the United States and translated into English from Italian can be considered an Italian product. The original text could be labeled Made in Italy, the result of a collaboration between its author, its Italian publisher, and possibly one or more Italian intermediaries. This, however, would mean turning a blind eye to the transnational literary network of influences in which such individuals were entangled. Even more than their source texts, in fact, anglophone translations challenge national boundaries: They were printed, bound, marketed, and sold as hardbacks or paperbacks in the United States; they involved transatlantic partnerships and some or several mediators (Pellizzato 2024b; Sullam 2021; La Penna and Sullam 2020; Cossu-Beaumont 2018; Cottenet 2017; Beltrami 2016; Bassnett and Lefevere 1990; Venuti 1998); and yet they would not exist were it not for their Italian source text. With few exceptions (such as Buzzati [1947] and Johnson [1961], which were manufactured in Italy; see Healey 2019; Reginald and Burgess 1973), the literary works examined herein and their manifestations as hardback and paperback editions in the US publishing system are by definition transnational co-constructions of meaning.As a matter of course, book trade in the United States during the twentieth century included printed materials in several languages. In this article, I will focus on fiction translated from Italian and published in English in the United States. These volumes were crafted with the goal of making them prosper in their textual, visual, and publishing environment of adoption.A survey on literary translations during the years 1945–1965 shows that translated books could differ significantly from their first editions in the source language at several levels. The titles of some of these books were changed, like Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere becoming The Short Cut (1957), Elsa Morante's Menzogna e sortilegio becoming House of Liars (1951), Elio Vittorini's Il Sempione strizza l'occhio al Frejus becoming The Twilight of the Elephant (1951), and so on (Healey 2019). Translated books had distinct paratexts (Batchelor 2018; Genette 1997)—different accompanying texts such as blurbs, introductions, and so forth—and were consequently framed differently in their target literary field or could be understood as belonging to a different literary genre (an example is the case of Leonardo Sciascia; see Pellizzato 2023). Finally, changes could involve the contents of the books themselves, like Giovanni Guareschi's Little World of Don Camillo, thoughtfully discussed by Lawrence Venuti (1998, 124–157), and even the novel's structure and plot, as illustrated by the case of Goffredo Parise's The Dead Boy and the Comets (Pellizzato 2021, 357–363). Such reformulations took place at the intersection of various interests: The publisher's desire to issue a rewarding publication (be it in terms of financial gain, literary prestige, acquiring a specific author, and so on) coexisted with interests of cultural diplomacy borne by a number of stakeholders.The writer and journalist David Dempsey provides an exemplary comment in this regard. In 1949, when the boom of literary translations from Italian was gaining traction in the US (Luciani 1959), Dempsey voiced concerns about the balance between literary exports and imports. His column In and Out of Books in the New York Times Book Review of December 11 reads: It will come as a shock to many Americans, and we mention it only as a point of information, but about a million dollars in E.C.A. funds allocated to Italy have indirectly abetted the sale of books over there by the Not-Very-Flattering-to-America school of novelists—Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, et al. The recipient of the money is Arnoldo Mondadori, Italy's largest publisher. . . . In return for our help, he has exported the current crop of Italian novelists now having a vogue here [in the US]—Moravia, Pratolini and Vittorini—men who can slum it with the best of them. (Dempsey 1949, 8)Dempsey states that the Marshall Plan (E.C.A. stands for Economic Cooperation Administration) was promoting the export of authors who presented the United States in an unfavorable light, probably because they explored aspects of life and society in the United States that were considered problematic, while Italian authors who were being translated in the United States seemed to be doing a better job at promoting their own country. In the contemporary public discourse, cultural and political implications of transatlantic literary transfers were considered more significant than financial gains and losses. At the same time, commentators such as Dempsey were probably less aware of the reverse perspective, that is, the fact that Moravia's, Pratolini's, Vittorini's, and other authors’ books were in fact translated and manufactured out of Italy toward ends (be they commercial, artistic, geopolitical, etc.) that were inherent to the US cultural system.Considering the literary, historical, and geopolitical phenomena of the postwar decades suggests several possible hypotheses about the function performed by translated books in their target market: offering a specific picture of Italy crafted by US academics and publishers; providing a moment of entertainment set in Italy, as the covers of many paperback editions seem to suggest; or even affording the US literary system an intercultural encounter sparking innovation, as some coeval texts produced by the publishers New Directions and New American Library indicate (see Pellizzato 2024a). With the intention of exploring the ways in which different publics in the United States interacted with Italian fiction, I will examine the differentiated paratexts and discourses around some specific Italian translated texts in an attempt to realize a social history of the uses they had in the US (Chartier 1995). In order to do so, I will examine the place of fiction books in Italy and in the United States. Then I will retrace how contemporary Italian fiction was presented by two US publishers, the New American Library and New Directions. Both these firms exemplify the salient aspects and transformations of the US publishing system during those years: the growing importance, both in terms of literary prestige and sales, of paperbacks; the expansion and internationalization of the market; and the role played by translated titles. Both firms, moreover, illustrate the effects of transatlantic interactions. The cultural experiments of the 1930s, such as Kurt Enoch's Albatross imprint reviewed below, and then the totalitarianisms and the war fought on European soil directly affected the publishing system in the United States. The diaspora of dissident intellectuals and publishers brought new literary agencies and publishing enterprises to the United States, enhancing the literary transfer between the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean.What was the place of a fiction book in the experience of readers in Italy and the United States in the aftermath of World War II? There were significant discontinuities between the two continents: In general, Italian books marketed in the United States were not necessarily those in vogue in the mother country (Healey 2019; Prezzolini 1954; Ragusa 1932).During the second half of the 1940s, generations of readers in Italy were actively seeking what they had not been able to read during the Fascist era and the war. These were former partisans, soldiers or prisoners of war, young people who had not been able to complete their education and who were, according to articles from the time as well as later historical accounts, hungry for books (Ferretti 2004, 61–70; Cadioli 1995, 117; Pettinos Blow 1947).In the United States, instead, during the 1940s the reading public had expanded considerably without the censorship of a totalitarian regime and relevant material limitations imposed by armed conflict and military occupation (albeit with shortages due to the war effort; Luey 2015, 25). Publishers and the government worked together to supply an impressive number of books to troops stationed in various parts of the world, fostering a growing interest both at the fronts and at home. According to estimates by John Hench (2016, 187–189) and Linda Scott (2015, 73–75), between 1943 and 1947 Armed Services Editions printed nearly 123 million copies of 1,322 titles. There was a stark difference between the availability of books in the United States and the scarcity that reigned in Europe, as evidenced in a letter by the publisher Blanche Wolf Knopf, who had visited the United Kingdom and France as early as 1946: “There is a terrific cry for books. . . . We here [in the United States] cannot conceive how a country like France with no free literature, no free reading for five years, what it means for them to get books again” (quoted in Hench 2016, 166).Such divergent tendencies, the active search for books after a period of scarcity versus an availability not even contingent on the intentionality of a purchase, may explain at least in part what Giuseppe Prezzolini wrote about US bookstores in the early 1950s: È curioso, ma l'America manca quasi completamente della libreria come si vede a Roma, a Parigi, o a Monaco di Baviera. Il libro si vende un po’ da per tutto, è un oggetto di consumo, direi, più che in Europa; si trova nelle farmacie e nei grandi magazzini, ma soltanto il libro d'attualità è ricercato dal grosso pubblico. . . . I clubs dei libri, che dominano il mercato librario, insieme con le ristampe dei romanzi popolari, rendon difficile Il è è di un but the of bookstores see in or Books are sold more or less a I would more than they are in them in the and the but only current books that the public . . . 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at a public and in with and and the 1940s and trade publishers to the to their books to publishers that produced that this would the of their authors and 2015, and and in the was to a new for the readers of the best of the publishing They included a fiction that to a of and a and which a for school and These two would later be by a which produced at and the a of and were able to having published and new and on a of social and even In a as as the United States, at a time when the for of the the of the two publishers was to have the of the paperback network and than and to a books that then had been considered literary for the the of the first of the some authors from Italy, and in the translated into with Italy being for of the These authors were Ennio Giuseppe Elio and other sold many authors one million to million in the of were anglophone not however, that translations were the early in fact, of literary or an in the of trade publishing In the of literary these were in the 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Giulia Pellizzato (2024) studied this question.