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In summer of 1965, Christopher Ricci's mother has runaway. Unable to take care of him, his father decides to leave the thirteen year old with his own sister in upstate New York. In this poignant coming of age novel, Chris tries his best to adapt to life in rural New York, navigate first love, and make sense of his changing world.

"The Mercury Man" is a collection of thirty-six memoir narratives about growing up on the streets of Brooklyn in an Italian working-class family in the 1950s and early '60s with his doo-wop singing, gang fighting, sexually provocative, and drug abusing crew. In this intimate collection, Frank Gioia shines a light on the offbeat, unusual, and destructive with the sounds and texture of an earlier time and place.

With rugged verse "like a strega's curse," Angelo Zeolla navigates the stoops and alleyways of the Bronx through worlds of languages, dialects, culturesa, and more. "The Bronx Unbound" is a kaleidoscopic collection, unveiling the Mediterranean dwelling in that infamous New York borough and "the realization that civilization/is eternally Caught up in the/flux."

This multi-genre collection explores and unravels the complexities of "home" as a physical and cultural space, and as a contested condition of being. Drawing on personal experience as well as on the stories of ancestors, Luisa Giulianetti shares the lives of characters mired in loss and grief, those with their feet in two worlds, and others who try-however imperfectly-to fashion home from inherited ruins and imagined futures.

Nicholas A. DiChario's Giovanni's Tree: New Italian Folktales is a wildly imaginative book and an important contribution to Italian-American stories. In this collection, DiChario honors the traditional folktale form, while taking the genre in new and exciting directions. DiChario's fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Hugo awards, among others, and his stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century.

The weaver's shuttle turns at the death of Gia Falcini's mother, when Gia's estranged father in Italy sends a scarf whose unusual qualities could revive Gia's ailing fabric shop in Boston's North End. Goaded by conflicting desires, Gia journeys to her father's village and the stepfamily she has never met, a vibrant local fabric mill, and Italy's style capital. The adventure could shred Gia's ambitions or offer a legacy worth taking away.

"Mike Fiorito shoots the brief documentary tales of "The Hated Ones" in a vivid black and white, bringing to life a "Basketball Diaries"-like world of ne'er-do-wells growing up on the wrong side of whatever tracks separate the silver spoons from the rest of us with our wayward fathers, disappointed mothers, and ill-defined dreams of being somebody"--

"In a rural New Jersey town, on the eve of WWII, young Marie Genovese looks out from her apartment window above the Five & Ten and wonders how she'll save the failing store she's inherited from her mother. Forced to bake for extra money, Marie dabbles in herbs, and hopes to change her fate. But when a herb-laced cake causes a wealthy local banker and Marie to fall in love, her troubles only compound-a family friend plots to take the store, her brother is involved in a fascist hate crime, and Marie becomes pregnant by her married lover. Enter the mysterious Aunt Ada from Italy, who brings a skill with herbs and knowledge of the family's Italian past. Soon Marie will face a choice: accept the protection of her wealthy lover, or defiantly break cultural norms by remaining independent. In a time similar to today, full of fear, economic uncertainty, and the controlling behavior of men, a powerful line of women, living and dead, helps Marie decide. ITALIAN LOVE CAKE is a story of a rare feminist awakening in 1939"--

"In this historical novel, a Sicilian immigrant navigates the spheres of workers rights and organized crime in his adopted homeland"--Kirkus Reviews.

Anna Citrino has woven the story of Italian immigrants-their small joys and compelling heartaches-into a moonlit tapestry. Thread by poetic thread, this book is an exquisite fabric of personal journeys, cultural insights, and little known Italian American history. I loved entering this "space between," created with great love and profound grace.-Catherine Ann Lombard A Space Between is that rarity in books of poetry, a book that coheres, where everything is of a piece. . . . The book brings vividly alive the immigrant experience. The differences between the two worlds that the characters inhabit are rendered with skill and delicacy . . . A Space Between has epic sweep rendered in a wide range of voices, each distinctive, each compelling.-Michael L. Newell A massive, ambitious effort of epic proportions that rewards with its interweavings of history, consequence, heritage, and legacy. How heartening it is to witness in these poems the resonance through generations of immigration and sacrifice to provide for living, surviving, prospering. -Nicholas Samaras

Palazzeschi is indeed a rare personality; in him a cool detachment does not stop sympathy; he scrutinizes, questions, even challenges convention without ever rejecting it. His outlook on life seems to combine that of a small boy at a circus (and probably one who has sneaked under the canvas) with that of a sage who knows that wisdom begins but does not necessarily stop at melancholy.-Thomas G. Bergin Aldo Palazzeschi is surely Italy's most neglected major twentieth century author . . . he ranks high as a poet and writer of fiction.-Nicolas J. Perella I found these translations of a major literary voice of the twentieth century, who has yet to enjoy much fame outside of Italy, to be faithful to the spirit of the originals and most capable in effectively rendering difficult texts. These most welcome translations are accompanied by critical essays by leading Palazzeschi scholars that help orient readers through the Futurist manifestos that lie at the foundation of Palazzeschi's career as a "tragicomic writer" and capture "the essence of his spiritual outlook" as well as his ambivalent relationship with Futurism throughout his literary career.-Mark Pietralunga

This book blooms. The poet takes us on a walk through time, from the old neighborhood with its palimpsest of paese, to the mature juicy voice of the lover poet who plays piano nocturnes and faces the night penning love poems with "the pleasant flutter of an eager heart." Cappello grew up coming home through the doorway of her father's shoemaker shop where there were "cactus filled windows"-never curtains-as "he needed sun to sew his leather by." These poems in turn give the reader a sun filled window with which to do the work of life. And a choir of voices through which this collection of poetry blooms. Her grandmother who sang a song "about how wine is necessary for health." Her mother who "couldn't sleep at night," so "every nighttime sound she heard." Her father who left behind "a thousand blank pages" and faced "towards Italy as he played" mandolin. Her sister Frances who "Wringing her hands / she wants to talk / but keeps the words / trapped in her fingers..." All the breaking and keeping silence, silences vowed, silences enforced. "Voices spoke hungrily" Cappello reports. We can take our instruction how to read this collection directly from the poet herself: "...I rest my head on your / chest, hear your heartbeat, revel in that sacred sound..."-Annie Lanzillotto

Once again, Maria Famà makes us smile as she cajoles us with profound folk wisdom and ironic wit. This is a book everyone of any background can delight in. The witty folk wisdom it offers can be cherished for a lifetime. -Daniela Gioseffi, American Book Award winner The Good for the Good weaves wit and warmth into poems inspired by Italian and Sicilian sayings embraced by her family through generations. -Amy Barone, Author of We Became Summer These poems create a rich tapestry of folk wisdom, linguistic hybridism, and inter-generational transfer across two sides of an ocean. . . . Famà's reflections on the legacies of her Sicilian heritage are as timeless as the sayings that inspired her work. -Lina Insana, Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh

Poetry. Italian Studies. In poems born of the rocky soil of the old country, where children learn to sew in a 'walled-in-garden' with 'one potted plant--crown of thorns, ' Frasca threads history and myth. She tells of immigrant hope that turns so quickly to devastating loss, and makes exile real--the self in search of the self. Writing to her counterpart, Anna, who dies young back in Sicily, and carrying her father's ghost, time feels endless, simultaneous. But Frasca is also a poet of wonder, and this work is alive, visionary, painterly. Here, myth isn't an old story, it is the art of transformation, and Frasca embodies an ever-present unfolding.--Anne Marie Macari Like mulberries that both stain and heal, these luscious poems and stories insist on our culpability in the misery of familiar or distant others while also consoling and nurturing with sensorial and sensual pleasures only a poet like Frasca, living within the tension between assimilation and alienation, between worlds that 'disorient & enlighten, ' can deliver. Frasca threads through memories wary of the ways nostalgia scars, seeking antidotes by turning writing into a 'battledress, ' and crafting introspection into a means of saving us 'from our ugly stink.' Enter WILD FENNEL's 'feral fires' and you will emerge both bruised and blessed, loving anise seeds and the smell of fox the way one should, on their own terms.--Mihaela Moscaliuc

Poetry. Italian Studies. The poems in SEASON OF SUBTRACTION are at once effortlessly attainable, and at the same time surprisingly fresh and delightfully unexpected...If you listen carefully, you can hear Michelle say, Yes, you come too. SEASON OF SUBTRACTION is an extraordinary book.--John Stanizzi The prose poems that make up SEASON OF SUBTRACTION bask in the poetics of language and syntax; they are bricks paving a dream-village, both American and Old World...I am in awe of the space Michelle Messina Reale creates: its friction, its strength, its mournful insistence, and the speaker who 'pin[s] my father's heart to the wall and pray[s] a novena to lost souls...'--Jennifer Martelli SEASON OF SUBTRACTION is like Sicily's own citrus fruits--hybridized, yet native and emblematic; sweet and intricate, yet often bitter in places at the whim of life's turning. With its nuanced language, crafted metaphors, and raw honesty, Reale's work is a treat to be savored.--Chad Frame In SEASON OF SUBTRACTION, Michelle Reale entangles you in the language of ache and need, and the search for a lost relative who becomes a found love...You will gather so many pieces in this beautiful collection, and you will exit it feeling whole, knowing what was once lost is now home.--Kailey Tedesco

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Italian American Studies. Talarico's true-life narratives inevitably remind you of your own best, half-buried memories.--Chicago Tribune Ross Talarico is a truly gifted poet.--James Wright Some say Ross Talarico has done the impossible.--Katie Couric In Ross Talarico's poems is distilled much of what has been best in poetry.--Donald Justice Ross Talarico has a rare talent: he captures the inner thoughts of 'ordinary' people and reveals their extraordinary visions.--Studs Terkel Talarico writes like a latter-day Wordsworth.--H.L. Hix

MISSING MADONNAS begins with the lunar arrival of its author, Gil Fagiani, who throughout this collection explores mythical Madonnas, nonnas, and urban addiction and redemption for a portrait of a life lived in pain and triumph. Dedicated to his Orlandini family, this book, first posthumous, is the final in a trilogy-CHIANTI IN CONNECTICUT and STONE WALLS-from a first generation American whose poetry transcends the conventional visions of the post-war 50's, the turbulent 60's, and the bitter tenderness of a life that ended much too soon.

"And there was one more question posed to me, over and over again, mostly by my big-hearted, bull-headed, capa tosta of a father. It typically flew my way when the cyclone of rage and love and fear and affection ripped through the walls, shaking the everyday worlds . . . Who do you think you are?"

Poetry. Music. Italian American Studies. forgetfulness / is food for gods / and words are too / so I sit on the sill / of this white window / and plan a house / with means I get / bricks I collect / and stare outside / anticipating works--from Father

Not being a man, I bleed like this. -Bhanu Kapil, "What is the shape of your body?"

I can think of no other writer who can better express the ine able sense of being born into the working poor before moving through di erent genres of living-hired factory hand, engineer, professor, poet, then back to hired academic hand-as he searches for a sense of the real through genres of writing-memoir, ction, poetry, criticism. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure is as engrossing as any written lived experience, only more so: a meditation on what it is not to be a Hollywood celebrity, war hero, or anyone of note, but a human trying to make it, and trying to make sense of "it" as a writer who can look back and see how much of our lives are composed by the constraints of storytelling we and our societies create. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure begins with poetics, but ends as philosophy.-STEVE TOMASULA, author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Once Human: Stories