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Interviews | June 19, 2009

All posts by Dave Jim Lynch Makes Landscape Art... Out of Text

If Carl Hiaasen set one of his novels on a residential stretch of boundary line between British Columbia and Washington, or if Richard Russo's characters had relatives in the Pacific Northwest, the result might be something like Jim Lynch's Border Songs. Continue »


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    Border Songs

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The End

by Salvatore Scibona

The End Cover

ISBN13: 9781555974985
ISBN10: 1555974988
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A brilliant debut novel about a single day in 1953 as lived by six people at an ohio carnival

A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely drawn characters we meet that day, each of whom will come to their own conclusion.

 The End follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, a jeweler—dramatically into the heart of a crime that will twist all their lives. Against a background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, we at last return to August 15, 1953, and see everything Rocco saw—and vastly more—through the eyes of various characters in the crowds.

 The End is the unforgettable debut of a singular new American novelist.

Review:

"The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for 'the New Jersey.' Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel's radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona's calibrated precision and the story's potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Synopsis:

Scibona follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, and a jeweler into the heart of a crime that will twist all their lives--against a background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, set in 1953.

About the Author

Salvatore Scibona’s fiction has been published in The Threepenny Review and the Pushcart Prize anthology. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the writing coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Product Details

ISBN:
9781555974985
Author:
Scibona, Salvatore
Publisher:
Graywolf Press
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
General
Subject:
Italian americans
Subject:
Italian American families
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Ohio
Subject:
Nineteen fifties.
Edition Description:
Collector's and
Publication Date:
May 2008
Binding:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Pages:
297
Dimensions:
9.30x6.40x1.10 in. 1.24 lbs.

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