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This issue of «Elephant & Castle» does not intend to investigate "the secret" as a simple motif in literature among others, but rather to reach the core of literature itself which, as Derrida maintains (Passions, 1993), is an exemplary secret. It is a secret that challenges all hypotheses "concerning the meaning of a text or the final intentions of an author" and that trascends each act of reading, precisely because it leaves us "breathless", since "the secret excites us". Furthermore, it gives rise to hermeneutical issues and it gives way to endless searches for meaning, always renewing itself, like the figure in the carpet that Henry James conceived as the very distinctive sign – i.e. the paradigm – of a text. Thus, the secret becomes the absolute principle of a writing process and an interpretation that "can never end, because it constitutes the secret itself" (Todorov, The Poetics of prose, 1971). As a structuring principle of the text, the secret is often a narrative ‘engine’, a strategy of concealment and unveiling. The writing process sets sail, masks, disguises, but at the same time strikes the reader, because it has to do with such discursive levels as dialectic intimacy, superficiality, transparency, opacity, truth, and lie. The enunciative scene disclosed by a secret can lead to confidence or confession and can evoke the images of the veil or the coffer, i.e. something that separates and hides as the etymology of the term suggests: secretum, from the verb secernere, with the meaning of separating, keeping on the sidelines. The concept of "secret", pervasive but showing uncertain and imprecise boundaries, has so far been discussed as the very essence of literature. Actually, the notion of secrecy opens up different paths of meaning, if put in dialogue with such disciplines as art, philosophy, history, theology, and many others.