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2008-2009
Writers Read
Monday, September 15, 2008
Karen Tintori reads from her memoir Unto the Daughters: The
Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family (St.
Martins Press. 2007).
Unto the Daughters
is a historical mystery and family story that unwraps layers of family,
honor, memory, and fear to reveal an honor killing in Detroit at the turn of the 20th
century. The book began with a genealogical quest that led to a reluctant
revelation about Frances Costa, Karen Tindori’s
great-aunt who had been systematically eradicated from family history. Frances emigrated from Sicily
with her parents and siblings who worked together to create a new home for
themselves in industrial Detroit.
At age sixteen Frances
fell in love with a young barber but her father had arranged for her to marry
an elderly mafioso so as to help his sons with
their mob connections. When Frances
eloped with her lover in 1919, her fate was sealed. Tindori
traces the history of her Sicilian immigrant past to expose the fetid secret of
Frances’s
brutal murder at the hands of her own brothers fiercely guarded for nine
decades.
“Tintori refused to allow the truth to remain forgotten.
This is a book for anyone who shares the conviction that all history, in the
end, is family history.”
— Frank Viviano,
author of Blood Washes Blood
Monday, October 27, 2008
Marisa Labozzetta reads from At
the Copa (Guernica,
2007).
With
humor and poignancy, these stories expose the social and sexual turmoil of
men and women in “the old age of youth.” In “The Knife
Lady,” a seemingly happily married suburbanite receives a jolt of
sexual panic with the visit of a woman selling knives. The husband in
“Future Games” encourages his wife to have an affair with another
man to save their floundering marriage, and the resulting drama is parsed
through the uncomprehending eyes of their young daughter. A restless dentist
on a visit to a bizarre charlatan discovers an unlikely cure to what’s
ailing him. These are a few of the stories whose primary fault zone is the
seemingly stable, often secretly troubled, middle-class marriage seen
from various views.
“Labozzetta infuses her stories with a wry wit and a
subtle, nuanced feel for the shifting emotional currents underlying seemingly
placid lives.”
— Kirkus
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Suze
Rotolo
reads from A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in
the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008)
A
Freewheelin’ Time
is Suze Rotolo’s firsthand account
of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and
her relationship with Bob Dylan. Rotolo grew up during the Cold War and McCarthyism
as the daughter of Italian working-class Communists from Queens.
As a teenager, she met new friends in Greenwich Village
who, like her, were interested in the arts and politically active. Then in
July 1961, 17-year-old Rutolo met 20-year-old Dylan, a rising young musician.
While they were together, Dylan was transformed from an obscure folk singer
into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation. Rotolo recounts the story of her sweet
but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the
pressures of growing fame. She also writes about her involvement with the
civil rights movement and the sometimes frustrating experience of being a
woman in a male-dominated culture. A Freewheelin’ Time is a
vibrant, moving memoir of the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young
love, and of a vital subculture at its most creative.
“A
welcome, page-turning perspective conspicuously absent from the plethora
of books on Dylan and the folk era of the 1960s: that of a woman
witnessing it all from its cultural and political epicenter.”
—Todd Haynes, director of I’m
Not There
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Robert Tinnell presents his graphic novel Feast of the Seven
Fishes (Allegheny Image
Factory, 2005)
A
2006 Eisner Award-nominee for “Best Graphic Album: Reprint,” Feast
of the Seven Fishes is hardcover collection of the online strip
serialized in 2004-2005 by writer Robert Tinnell and artists Ed Piskor and Alex Saviuk. A
romantic comedy, the Feast
storyline revolves around an Italian-American family’s celebration of
the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. The time is 1983 and one of the younger
members of the family, who reside in a north-central West Virginia mining and mill town, brings
home a blonde, blue-eyed Protestant girl to share in both the cooking and
eating. Their path to romance, however, is not an easy one. This collection
incorporates recipes from the families of Tinnell
and his wife, Shannon.
“This Feast is bound to serve up entertainment... [a] charming comic-strip tale of life, love, and baccala. . . . ”
— The
Boston Globe
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