Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780823229109)

For more than thirty years, the journal Italian Americana has been home to the writers who have sparked an extraordinary literary explosion in Italian-American culture. Across twenty-five volumes, its poets, memoirists, story-tellers, and other voices bridged generations to forge a brilliant body of expressive works that help define an Italian-American imagination. Wild Dreams offers the very best from those pages: sixty-three pieces-fiction, memoir, poetry, story, and interview-that range widely in style and sentiment, tracing the arc of an immigrant culture's coming of age in America. What stories do Italian Americans tell about themselves? How do some of America's best writers deal with complicated questions of identity in their art? Organized by provocative themes-Ancestors, The Sacred and the Profane, Love and Anger, Birth and Death, Art and Self-the selections document the evolution of Italian-American literature. From John Fante's My Father's God, his classic story of religious subversion and memoirs by Dennis Barone and Jerre Mangione to a brace of poets, selected by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma, ranging from John Ciardi, Jay Parini, and Mary Jo Salter to George Guida and Rachel Guido de Vries. There are also stories alive with the Italian folk tradition (Tony Ardizzone and Louisa Ermelino), and others sleekly experimental (Mary Caponegro, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson). Other pieces-including an unforgettable interview with Camille Paglia-are Italian-American takes on the culture at large

Author: Carol Bonomo Albright
ISBN-10: 0823229106
ISBN-13: 9780823229109
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/15/2008
Pages: 350
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/15/2008 pg. 72
Foreword 08/19/2009