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Dear Readers,
This year at Sanremo, J-Ax gave listeners an Italia Starter Pack. This spring, we are excited to complement it with our own Italianità Starter Pack filled with the latest Bordighera Press publications.
Exploring the ways Italian culture and heritage evolves and adapts in the United States, our new titles include the roadtrip across the US by a couple of Italian journalists, the poetics of lesbian dinosaurs, and a son's exploration of his parents struggles to survive World War II and the Holocaust, among many others.
We invite you to preview our full spring catalog below.
Buona lettura,
Fred L. Gardaphé
Nicholas Grosso
Anthony Julian Tamburri
P.S. This May and June we will hold our annual open reading period, get your full length manuscripts ready and stay tuned for information on how to submit.
| | N.B. You might have noticed a few changes to the look of this newsletter. In 2024, Bordighera Press became an official imprint of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY. In the meantime, we have been slowly merging many aspects of our work into the Calandra's network. This is our first newsletter, keep an eye out for future collaborations. But please be mindful, in coming newsletters, our contact lists will merge and you will receive news and updates from the Calandra Institute if you choose to remain subscribed. | | | | |
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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(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 36.2 includes essays from Nicholas Skaldetvind, Joanne Furio, and Kevin Carollo; fiction by Matthew Cariello and Enzo Zingale; and poetry from Toni Artuso, Alissa Sammarco, Gina Sconza, Michael Palma, Emily De Ferrari, Dodici Azpadu, Peter J. Grieco, Nicole Santalucia, Jennifer Lagier, Robert Castagno, M. Nasorri Pavone, and Matthew Cariello.
Order a copy of Volume 36.2 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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| | Grazie mille a tutti i nostri lettori e scrittori! | | | | |
