Wild Dreams

Wild Dreams

The Best of Italian Americana

  • Author: Albright, Carol Bonomo; Herman, Joanna Clapps
  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • ISBN: 9780823229109
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823229123
  • Place of publication:  New York , United States
  • Year of publication: 2009
  • Year of digital publication: 2009
  • Month: August
  • Language: English

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.

  • Cover Page
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • CONTENTS
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  • INTRODUCTION
  • ANCESTORS
    • PROSE
      • My Father’s
      • The Actor Prepares
      • The Night Maggie Saw God and Sal Barnum Too
      • Sizes
      • An Etruscan Catechism
      • Lamb Soup
      • Marco’s Marcoroni
      • The Guest
    • POETRY
      • East River Nocturne
      • On the Square
      • Autobiography
      • Tea at Aunt’s
      • Cento at Dawn
      • L’Esiliatu
      • The Exile
      • The Cellar Twenty Years Later
      • Minotaur
      • The Garden of the Apocalypse
      • In the Golden Sala
      • Father’s Days
      • In Tunis I Walked through Halfaween
      • Shinto Mama
      • Spanish Steps
      • Nana’s Earrings
  • THE SACRED AND PROFANE
    • PROSE
      • Against Gravity
      • My Friend
      • That Winter Evening
      • Sanctifying Grace
    • POETRY
      • Luisa and Buffalo Bill
      • The Concept of God
      • My Father at Eighty-five
      • The Caves of Love
      • Linens
  • LOVE AND ANGER
    • PROSE
      • The Two Uncles: An Addendum to Mount Allegro
      • The Prince of Racalmuto
      • Wild Heart
      • A Conversation with Camille Paglia
      • Big Heart
      • Permanent Waves
      • Perfect Hatred
    • POETRY
      • Inside the Inside of the Moon
      • Why I Drive Alfa Romeos
      • Walking My Son on the Beach
      • The Skeleton’s Defense of Carnality
  • BIRTH AND DEATH
    • PROSE
      • A Marvelous Feat in a Common Place
      • Where It Belongs
      • Unraveled
      • Mama Rose
      • Cairns
      • Card Palace
    • POETRY
      • Planting a Sequoia
      • É si riuniscono, questi vecchi …
      • Grandmother in Heaven
  • ART AND SELF
    • POETRY
      • Cape Clear
      • Language Lesson
      • Lizard-Tree
      • Athletes of God
      • Libretto
      • Books, how silent you are
      • Requiem for a Practical Possum
      • Self-Portrait as Woman Posed on Flowered Couch
      • Happenstance
      • War Song
  • ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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