About us

effequ is an independent, libertarian, and radical publishing house that turns publishing into a space of political and cultural intervention.
It moves against the current, outside the balance of the dominant market: it does not seek to reassure, but rather to unsettle, to question, to dismantle established narratives and the hierarchies of common sense. Its catalogue, disobedient by vocation, is inhabited by eccentric voices, queer bodies, marginal and monstrous gazes, visions that open cracks in reality.

effequ’s editorial project is intrinsically political because it grounds its work in the transformation of the imaginary: its stories and essays do not merely describe the world, but deconstruct it to expose its distortions and suggest alternatives. The fantastic, the uncanny, mythology, and technology are not used as escapism, but as critical tools to rethink power, identity, sexuality, bodies, and institutions.

effequ’s series embody this tension:
• Rondini, dedicated to contemporary Italian fiction, explores reality through monsters, ruptures, and reinventions, narrating eccentric subjectivities and rewriting the coordinates of normality.
• Merli, the nonfiction series, creates a dialogue between critical thought and personal narrative, reflecting on themes such as the body, desire, political imagination, representation, and self-determination.
• Scatoline, aimed at children, is an alphabet series of short essays: it stimulates critical thinking and freedom of expression through reflection on words, in a highly legible format. A political project that recognizes children as active subjects in the construction of meaning. Scatoline is curated by Vera Gheno.
• Elettra, a five-part series curated by Olga Campofreda and Eloisa Morra, is a hybrid space between creative writing and analytical gaze. With short, intense forms, it moves across the territories of criticism, memoir, and storytelling, sparking divergent visions and shifting the focus onto the daughter–father relationship from a feminist perspective.
• Calibano, a quarterly monographic journal, is published in collaboration with the Rome Opera House. Calibano is a collective laboratory of political and cultural reflection. Each issue tackles a key theme drawn from an opera, with essays, narratives, and images that challenge the mechanisms of common sense.

In an era of flattening public discourse, effequ asserts the value of dissent and complexity. It gathers stories that do not aim to please everyone, but speak to those who refuse neutrality as a stance and normality as a model. Its editorial work is a militant practice, capable of returning wonder to the reader as a critical and profoundly human gesture.

effequ is part of the Staffette network, publishers against the doping of the book market.

About the use of schwa (non gendered language): see here.