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Roberto Bui
Roberto Bui a.k.a. Wu Ming 1 is a member of the Wu Ming contingent of novelists and radical mythographers.
He was a founder and member of the Luther Blissett Project. "Luther Blissett" was (and in a way still is) a multi-use name which could be adopted by anyone interested in constructing the subversive reputation of an imaginary character, allegedly the virtual leader of an open community thriving on media pranks, myth-making, subversive writings, radical performance art and communication guerrilla. All output was strictly anti-copyright. The LBP started in 1994 and involved several hundreds of people in various countries, although Italy remained the epicenter. Blissett's most famous and successful book was a novel titled *Q*, which was published in the early days of 1999. *Q* left many people astonished: not only a major publishing house such as Einaudi accepted to issue a book with an anti-copyright notice, but the book became a smash hit, sold more than 80,000 copies in Italy and was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish and Greek. Piper Verlag is going to publish the novel in Germany by the spring of 2002.
At the end of 2000 the founders and long-time members of the LBP put an appropriate end to the firts "five-year plan" by committing a symbolic seppuku (ritual samurai suicide) and quitting the Project. In January 2001 the four authors of *Q* and the s-f writer Riccardo Pedrini (formerly a SHARP skinhead playing bass in Oi!-punk band Nabat) launched the new project, Wu Ming ("no name" in mandarin), a collective devoted to radical fiction and the exploration of myth-making processes.
Wu Ming edit an e-zine called "/Giap/", whose Italian edition is received by nearly 2,000 subscribers. /Giap/ deals with literature as politics and politics as literature.
Wu Ming's output so far:
October 2000: *Asce di guerra* [Hatchets of War], a non-fiction novel about Vitaliano Ravagli (who is also the co-author). In the mid-Fifties Ravagli fought guerrilla warfare in Laos as an international brigader in solidarity with the Vietminh and the Pathet Lao.
September 2001: *Havana Glam*, solo novel by Wu Ming 5 a.k.a. Riccardo Pedrini. It is about time travel, the US "Totality" plan to nuke Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad in 1946, the Cuban revolution and David Bowie. Soon to be published (March 2002): *54*, Wu Ming's most ambitious and complex novel about the Cold War, international drug smuggling (the "French Connection") and talking with the dead.
Info & contact at  wumingfoundation.com
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