Books

Excerpts from But We Built Roads for Them: The Lies, Racism, and Amnesia that Bury Italy’s Colonial Past, from the English translation by Domenic Cusmano of Noi però gli abbiamo fatto le strade: le colonie italiane tra bugie, razzismi e amnesia *** Some Parts Went Missing In the 20th century, Italy experienced a series of major upheavals on the path…

Mary Melfi has written over a dozen books, including fiction, non-fiction, memoires and plays, and her books have been translated into French and Italian. Her writing has been called disturbing, fascinating, cynical, ironic, breathtaking, imaginative, surrealistic, dream-like, powerful, skillful, and Freudian. Her latest book, a collection of poetry, is titled Welcome to Hard Times (Ekstasis Editions, 2023, 153 pages). Melfi’s…

Roots, Radici. (BeccoGiallo, 2022) is Bruna Martini’s new installment in her graphic memoir series and examines the author’s own altered identity. Once again Martini, who is the author of several graphic novels and picture books, shows her mastery of the genre, catapulting readers into the most diverse scenes and contexts, and keeping them gripped to the story until the very…

Bruna Martini torna a sorprenderci nuovamente con il suo graphic memoir, Roots. Radici, (BeccoGiallo, 2022) alla riscoperta della propria “identità mutata.” Ancora una volta la scrittrice, autrice di graphic novel e libri illustrati, mostra grande padronanza del genere che non delude e ci tiene avvinghiati al racconto fino all’ultima pagina. READ IN ENGLISH Mentre sfogliamo le pagine di Roots non…

An 11-year-old boy is walking on the edge of a forest near his uncle’s farm in the Lombardy region of Italy. The year is 1582. The boy is out hunting birds, but something else catches his eye. He sees a shaft of sunlight in the dark core of the forest and notices how it illuminates a patch of leaves near…

David Bellusci opens his latest poetry collection, Age of Innocence (Wipf and Stock, 2020), with a poem that heralds the sensory delights to come. “Angelic Park” is the first of thirteen poems in the book’s initial section titled Book of Nature. Its dazzling imagery and metaphors paint a rich and enchanting scene. Turquoise waves, emerald crystals, / shower us. /…

An excerpt from the novel The Transaction. De Angelis, an inscrutable northerner, comes to a rural village in Sicily to negotiate a real estate transaction, only to find himself embroiled in a criminal conspiracy. What follows is a web of unsettling events, involving child prostitution and brazen killings. The chance encounter with an alluring, eleven-year-old, blue-eyed girl traps him in a psychological and moral cul-de-sac.…

Caterina Edwards immigrated to Edmonton at age eight with her British father and Venetian mother. The Edmonton author was the first Canadian woman of Italian heritage to publish in western Canada. She is well known for writing narratives of the return throughout her literary career, including The Lion’s Mouth (1982), Finding Rosa (2008), The Sicilian Wife (2015), and her story…

In her Italian-Canadian Narratives of Return. Analysing Cultural Translation in Diasporic Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 436) Michela Baldo maps out the theoretical questions posed by diaspora studies in a rich and compelling way. In the Introduction to the book, she clearly outlines her approach and provides an interesting meditation on “translation as a metaphor for diasporic writing.” She posits…

Compiled after decades of research by Marino Toppan, Land of Triumph and Tragedy: Voices of the Italian Fallen Workers is an epic volume. Contributions come from scholars of Italian-Canadian history, as well as family members of many of the fallen workers themselves from across Canada. This is a ground-breaking new book with profiles of those within the Italian community in…

Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli is the author of La Brigantessa (Inanna Publications, 2019), a novel based on true events in the aftermath of Italy’s 1861 Unification, a turbulent period known as “The Decade of Fire” (1860-1870), when scores of brigands rebelled against the harsh policies imposed by the new government, which in turn ordered the destruction of these outlaws and anyone…

Every type of communal life that goes on in the Italian city touches upon the piazza at some point. It seems likely that if you live near a piazza in an Italian city or village, you will visit that piazza at least once in a typical day, and so will most of your neighbours. Vincenzo Pietropaolo and I are sitting…

Bruna Di Giuseppe-Bertoni is the editorial author of Diary of a Tufarolo. The text, in Italian, consists of her father’s original diary, translated into English and published by Pia Marchelletta of Joie de Plume Books. Handwritten by Emilio Di Giuseppe, the diary traces the most important moments in the author’s life, from the happiest to the most difficult: an arduous…

Long before the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of people were constantly moving between the United States and British North America, and Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice and Trieste. Predominantly traders, sailors, transient workers, Catholic priests and seminarians, this group relied on the exchange of goods across the Atlantic to solidify transatlantic relations; during this period, stories about the New…

I’ve turned on my computer to write this review of Terri Favro’s new book, Generation Robot (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018), and I find it challenging to put into words how the book has affected me. Like Terri, I too vividly remember our milk, bread, and eggs arriving at our place by horse-drawn carts, and my mother telling me to announce the arrival so…

Mark Frutkin has published 16 books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Five of his books are set in Italy, including Fabrizio’s Return, which won both the Trillium Award and the Sunburst Award. He worked as a consultant on a public art project titled “Postcards from the Piazzas” in Ottawa’s Little Italy and has collaborated on a book of photos and text on…

  In her memoir The Unfinished Dollhouse, Michelle Alfano recounts the journey she underwent in accepting and embracing her son’s transgender identity. From tell-tale signs in early childhood and the mental and physical afflictions in the early teen years, to the reactions of family and friends and the final steps in a social and medical transition from female to male, Alfano explores…

Guido Nincheri is recognized as the most prolific Montreal artist of stained-glass windows and frescoes, but it was not his intention to settle in Montreal when he arrived with his bride in 1913. The newlyweds were originally headed to South America when the possibility of war in Europe changed their plans. The artist is most often cited for his fresco…

Border towns can be grey zones with split identities, regions where loyalties are divided, nations kiss, laws are broken, and boundaries are both enforced and transgressed. As literary settings, borders offer up stories that defy easy categorization: American Jeffrey Eugenides’ Detroit-based novel Middlesex and Canadian Craig Davidson’s Niagara Falls-based Cataract City come to mind as excellent examples of the form. I grew up on…

In The Honeymoon Wilderness (Mansfield, 2002), Pier Giorgio Di Cicco writes the kind of poetry that traces the cartography of the ordinary acts of living and how they make contact with our existential questions and the soul's longings. Di Cicco's voice attains a dazzling level of lyrical and spiritual power in this book of new poems, since he broke his publishing silence…