“I am a mole. I live in the black. My glass eyes have seen inside the earth, and everything was
black against black. I was a mark dug inside the earth. I was a fable forgotten.”

Driano is nearing the end of his life, and for years has been locked in a dark suffering that he
can’t explain. Years ago, at the peak of his despair, he rescued a dying mole and begged it to
exterminate the human race. Now the mole has gathered an army—of foxes, barn owls, goats,
bats, peacocks—that has risen to fight the mole’s battle. But other animals have chosen to give
their lives to save the humans—gulls and roosters, wolves and cats, magpies and hedgehogs. The
two sides clash in this eerie fable of man and beast, in which the violence and magic of nature
must cohabit with the loneliness of existence.

A story repeated from three points of view. A man reluctantly coming to terms with the end of
his life. The collective consciousness of animals fighting to save or destroy humanity. The men,
women, witches, and devils all telling of their impact on that same man. Three interconnected
worlds that touch—yet are unable to communicate.

At the cusp of natural and supernatural, The First Fall Day on Earth is a kaleidoscopic look at
confusion and isolation at the brink of destruction: a novel set in a land both real and enchanted, revealing behind every leaf and blade of grass the disturbing face of nothingness.

An excerpt from the novel has been selected and published on The Offing, the renowned American literary magazine with a commitment to centering marginalized voices by publishing works that challenge, experiment and provoke.

Born in 1982, STEFANO COSTA has always lived between the Oltrepò Pavese and Liguria’s Levante coast. Having spent his time, since childhood, between these two small yet vastly different worlds, without his heart resting in just one of them, he fell in love with the stories that take shape in both: stories of people, of animals, of houses, of threads, of objects found again in new places. Like in life, he always found things in places he wasn’t sure he left them. And since childhood he felt the need to follow them, these stories, follow them even after they seemed finished, concluded, exhausted–even after the person was no longer there to answer the doorbell, after that house or that balcony was left to the wind. Even after only objects were left.
So he studied literature and philology at Pavia, worked for micro- and macro publishers, and today is an editor, copy-editor, and writer. And he learned to translate those stories to the page, whether taking care of others’ books or writing his own. The First Fall Day on Earth is his literary debut.