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Dear Readers,
We have officially kicked off our open reading period for 2026. If you have a manuscript that offers nuanced visions of Italy or the diasporic experience consider submitting. Find complete submission guidelines and the submission page here.
Later this month, we will also be releasing the latest issue of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, The prose in the issue mixes memory and flights of fancy, where family stories are recalled, filled in, interpreted, and reinvented. And the issue presents a photo reimagining nonna in the kitchen as gothic horror. Find out more about the issue here.
And don't forget our spring catalog is out now, preview the books below.
Buona lettura,
Fred L. Gardaphé
Nicholas Grosso
Anthony Julian Tamburri
P.S. Welcome subscribers of the Calandra Institute newsletter to the Bordighera Press newsletter. In 2024, the press became an official imprint of the Institute and we have been slowly merging our operations. We hope you enjoy our contribution of italianità in North America and around the world.
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Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians
by Nicole Santalucia
ISBN: 978-1-59954-246-1
What is gay about the weather? Queer about gardening? Feminist about recovery? Lesbian about every piece of art? The poems in Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians move through the natural world, the political moment, literary lineage, and a domestic space, built piece by piece by two wives, to claim their rightful place at the center of poetry itself. Would the mentors and guides and ghosts referenced in these poems—many of them situated at the center of heteropatriarchal midcentury America—be able to clock Nicole Santalucia’s radical, full flowering? Maybe. Poetry has always been a complicated paradise, and we are lucky to have a new way in.
—Laura Cronk, author of Ghost Hour
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Heaven Knows
by Albert Tacconelli
ISBN: 978-1-59954-247-8
Al Tacconelli's latest series of poems looks at the present and peers backward into the past, often with brazen physicality. There are moments of love, of longing and loss, of reckoning with the past. But always, taking in and reproducing experiences in vibrant verbal sketches.
—Linda Pizzi
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At the Hour of Now
by Maria Lisella
ISBN: 978-1-59954-248-5
The unflinchingly honest story of a blended family that raises urgent questions, quells hearts and provides a gateway to healing from loss, bolstered by a firm belief in hope. Rich with dialogue, part love letter, part narrative in three voices, At the Hour of Now untangles the threads of storytelling, mental illness, grief, and caregiving. The randomness of fate, and the choices made or not made, span the globe from the Bronx to Italy, Morocco, and Puerto Rico. Ultimately, this book carries us past sorrow toward the elusive wonder of being alive to celebrate and survive with which each reader can identify.
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Where the Mountains Burn
by Andrew R. Novo
ISBN: 978-1-59954-249-2
A family's journey through the dignity of resistance and the atonement of a nation shackled by dictatorship.
Cleaning out the attic of his family home in New York, Andrew finds the diary of his grandfather, Rinaldo. At first, Rinaldo lives in comfort in Biella, in the foothills of the Alps. When war begins in 1940, Rinaldo's life becomes progressively more difficult and his skepticism of Italy's Fascist regime increases daily. Approaching his 18th birthday, he faces a choice: be conscripted into Mussolini's army or join the partisans of the Resistenza.
Where the Mountains Burn is a tale of trauma, memory, family, and resistance, reminding readers that history never dies, it is carried in each of us and is realized in every decision we make.
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In the Land of the Midday Sun
by John M. Glionna
ISBN: 978-1-59954-250-8
In 2023, Glionna experienced a cultural awakening: he travelled to his grandfather's home village to explore the landscape where his roots run centuries-deep. As he meets distant relatives, he asks questions echoed by all Americans exploring their ancestral homeland: "Who are these people?" "Who am I?" As a veteran Los Angeles Times journalist in search of his long-repressed Italianitá, he travels far off the tourist map, where he examines his grandfather's motives for emigrating. Beyond poverty and disease, he learns, southerners of his era faced a historic discrimination from their own countrymen that also drove them abroad. The book examines his father's upbringing as a child of immigrants and focuses on a realization that the author, like his father and grandfather, is proudly, deeply Italian, southern Italian.
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Red Snow
by Robert Zweig
ISBN: 978-1-59954-251-5
Red Snow is a son's exploration of the experiences of his parents during the Holocaust and World War II. In his endeavor to understand and imagine their lives, through research, he discovers the brutality and horrors they survived and the miraculous circumstances that brought them together.
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"The Ambiguity of the Hypotheses"
by Adria Bernardi
ISBN: 978-1-59954-252-2
It’s a tangle. It is a big tangle of a novel. A series of knots within knots within knots within knots. Long, winding, intertwined strands overlapping, then, abruptly, snapped off. And the moment you think you are just about to unravel a single strand from a single knot, gratified, self-satisfied even, another knot appears within that very same tangle. The sentences, the paragraphs, are long, and if you try to pick up reading where you left off, you have to reenter a tangle in order to venture back into the text to try to tease out a single thread to latch onto. Even if it seems that in trying to understand how one event is involved in causing another event, even if it seems certain things should be clear cut, they are not; in trying to understand how multiple conditions are involved in the causality of a single event, it remains and will remain, continually, one big tangle. As when, in asking oneself, but how could this awful thing have happened?
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Brothers
by Santo Versace
ISBN: 978-1-59954-237-9
"Relationships among siblings don't follow precise rules. Rather, they follow the ups and downs of life, like waves on the sea. You come together, you separate, you grow apart, and then together again. You play it by ear. Through calm seas or storms. Someone person falls overboard and someone else rescues them. You either reach the harbor sailing smoothly, or you’re forced to flee, chased by sharks. If I had to choose what was and still is the most extraordinary aspect of my life, even more than the success I've achieved, it was this navigation. I followed the wind, the winds of our family. I learned to live from my parents, I've encouraged Gianni and Donatella's projects, I've protected our assets.”
These are the words of Santo Versace, poetic words but always measured as is his nature. And in these pages he tells us his journey to here.
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(re)Covering America
by Maria Teresa Cometto and Glauco Maggi
ISBN: 978-1-59954-255-3
Two Italian journalists, husband and wife, who have lived in New York for 25 years, recount America through two coast-to-coast road trips as "special correspondents" for the Italian Cultural Institute of New York.
Far from the tourist circuits, they uncovered architectural curiosities like the University of Texas at El Paso campus, inspired by Bhutanese temples, and unexpected beauty such as the Crystal Bridges Museum nestled in the woods of Bentonville, Arkansas.
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Mitzvah
by Alain Elkann
ISBN: 978-1-59954-254-6
On Yom Kippur, from an early age Alain Elkann gathers in the temple of Rue de la Victoire in Paris in the company of his father and fasts for a whole day. And it is in Paris that he still returns today when he wants to feel at home, when he feels the need to “be only the son of his father and his mother”. But what does it mean to him to be Jewish today? Is coexistence and sincere dialogue with other religions possible? What is the future of Israel? Through Mitzvah, Elkann meditates on his relationship with Judaism and how it is essential to keep the family together thanks to the common thread of memory and the celebration of holidays.
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VIA: Voices in Italian Americana is a semiannual literary and scholarly review.
Volume 37.1 includes essays from Paul Frediani and Laura Camaioni; fiction by Chuck Schading and Livio Milanesio; artwork by Jaina Cipriano; research by Ester Luna on the magazine I-AM; and poetry from Ned Balbo, Gregg Orifici, Ava Serra, Adria Bernardi, Maria S. Picone, Annie Lanzillotto, Vincento Peloso, Joanna Clapps Herman, and Alise Versella.
Find the complete table of contents of Volume 37.1 or start your subscription today by ordering on our website.
We are open for submissions on Submittable, click here for complete guidelines.
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