The Collected Stories of Pietro di Donato

by Pietro di Donato

ISBN 978-1-59954-222-5

VIA Folios 174

Those who are familiar with the name Pietro di Donato usually begin and end their knowledge with his first novel, Christ in Concrete (1939). Here instead you will find the imaginative, pithy, and passionate word renderings of life according to the writer beyond that first novel. In every story you'll feel the fierce, unfiltered sensuality of a writer who turns contempt into expression, body parts into poetry, transgressions into confessions, and experiences into the basis for his political stands.

Hunger

by Danielle Jones

ISBN 978-1-59954-238-6

VIA Folios 183

Hunger is a fierce and intimate portrait of survival, inheritance, and the ache of becoming. In her debut collection, Danielle Jones moves across generations and continents-from wartime Italy to the Deep South-with poems that thread together the visceral details of history, family, and the body. Whether foraging in "abandoned gardens" or slicing "a potato so thin you can see the sun / of her skin shining through," these poems explore the everyday rituals of care and cruelty, the silences we carry, and the secrets buried in kitchens, attics, and the body itself.

—Diannely Antigua, author of Good Monster

It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live

by Libby Cataldi

ISBN 978-1-59954-239-3

VIA Folios 184

It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live is an intimate, multigenerational Italian American memoir immersed in the legacies of secrets, silence, and sacrifice of Southern Italy. 

One Trail of Longing, Another of String

by Carla Panciera

ISBN 978-1-59954-240-9

VIA Folios 185

In One Trail of Longing, Another of String, Carla Panciera communes with hawks, cows, owls, and loved ones, reflects on girlhood, motherhood, daughterhood, friendships, and the loss of parents, and wrestles with what bearing one's past has on the present and on the future.

Stardust Lives in Us

by Daniela Gioseffi

ISBN 978-1-59954-241-6

VIA Folios 186

In Daniela Gioseffi's poetry we're inspired to understand and embrace the natural world. Gioseffi's sympathy and empathy are everywhere in her poems and books, as in this new collection with her never-ending love for nature and the intricate and mysterious science of which it, and we, are composed . . . Imbued with respect for biological truths in an unfathomable universe-the poet reminds us we are made of the very dust of exploding stars. But, there's humor, too, in poems like Big Hearted, Witty and Wide-Eyed. After all despair is realized, the glories of the natural world can save us with inspiration to collective community, where lives influence each other, and we all breathe the same atmosphere. In quoting the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag, Daniela Gioseffi reminds us we're one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all

—Philip Appleman

Let it Be Extravagant

by Michelle Reale

ISBN 978-1-59954-242-3

VIA Folios 187

The poems in Let it be Extravagant limn the line between memory and desire, time and timelessness, and the real and imagined world. Generationally and ancestrally informed, Reale's poems create microworlds where experience is hard won, tussling with wide-eyed innocence, while tradition both stabilizes and confounds in a rapidly changing world. The ascendant language in these poems is one of seeing the value of where we come from, while relishing the thrill of the quotidian life in all of its vagaries.

If We Still Lived Where I Was Born

by Maria Giura

ISBN 978-1-59954-243-0

VIA Folios 188

In Maria Giura's If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, the narrator unlocks the meaning she's made of her childhood and heritage, spirituality and lost loves and draws the reader in to retrieve their own. The collection begins in the apartment above her parents' Brooklyn pastry shoppe where she imagines them still fighting, still making us, still together, then shifts to adulthood where she learns to stay still long enough to listen for the story, and then returns to childhood where her mother and aunts teach their kids to spread out their blankets and live. Moving between New York and Italy, between family and "stranger," these poems show longing and vulnerability, but also the thrill of being young and part of something larger than oneself, of making peace, and pursuing the path you were meant to. They brim with the people and places that have taught her the most and ring with pathos and celebration, from her immigrant father waiting for her on the corner . . . bread in his hand to the sister who pulled the music out of her, helped her make her own song. Beginning with a journey to a literal birth place and extending outward to many figurative places of self-discovery, this collection explores what lasts when all else passes away.

It's Saturday You Left Me and I'm So Beautiful

by Emanuele Pettener

ISBN 978-1-59954-234-8

Crossings 43

June 1990, the final question of the final exam: "What will you do now?" Emanuele knows what he wants, in fact, he knows very well: "The national anthem while I'm on the podium, the journalists waiting for me at the airport, the girls tearing their hair when I pass."

Livery Stable Blues

by Salvatore Mugno

ISBN 978-1-59954-235-5

Crossings 44

Livery Stable Blues is the story of misdirection, ego, and a biographer's quixotic attempts to capture the life of Nick LaRocca and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. 

In the dark of a school auditorium, the projection of March of Time would change Harry Brass's life forever; what happened next sent him on a 23-year journey, intertwining his fate with bandleader, Nick LaRocca, and led to the publication of the Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and its aftermath.

Pound's Silence

by Alain Elkann

ISBN 978-1-59954-236-2

Crossings 45

As Mirella Serri stated in tuttolibri, la Stampa, "The story ends with a clever surprise by the would-be biographer. Rightly, we are used to separating political orientation and artistic production. This applies, however, to literary criticism. Nonetheless, in the creative space of a novel Elkann allows himself the freedom that those who work with the imagination can afford. And so, he inflicts on Pound an exemplary punishment for his anti-Semitism, for his compromise with Nazism and fascism. A punishment that we certainly do not reveal what it is."

Our Mezzogiorno

edited by Nicoletta Stame

ISBN 978-1-59954-244-7

Il nostro mezzogiorno 3

This collection presents the group's mission statement in its general conception and shows how it has played out in terms of analysis and policy initiative. "Possibilist," democratic, and anti-verticalist in inspiration, it is centered on the Mezzogiorno, the case under study. But the Mezzogiorno also represents the archetype of a middle-of-the-scale situation-it is not underdeveloped, but nor is it the democratic market-economy society that it would like to become . . . Its ambition is to achieve a mastery of the situation and a progressive reduction of hierarchical structures 'through processes that enhance what is beautiful and good . . .'

—from the "Introduction"