Book picks similar to
Looking Through My Mother's Eyes by Giovanna Del Negro
immigration
italy
school-work-books
sicily-library
Love's Sweet Serenade
Kay Shanee - 2019
After spending months drowning her sorrows in wine and nineties R&B music, she finally decides it’s time to move on. As fate would have it,
she bumps into the man that is going to make her forget her ex was even a factor.
Twenty-six-year-old Gabe Amoure, owner of the breakfast food truck called “The G-Spot”, is not looking for love, but he’s not running from it either. His life experiences have taught him that if you want something, you have to pursue it with reckless abandon. When he spots Zola at a nineties
themed party, her beauty is breathtaking, and her vibe is magnetic. From the moment he bumped into her, he knew he had to have her.
When these two meet, their souls connect and neither of them shy away from their feelings. However, past experiences threaten to tear their love apart, unless they learn to face their demons head on.
Will their pasts force them apart or will love’s sweet serenade bind them together?
How to Paint a Dead Man
Sarah Hall - 2009
With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" (The Guardian), delivers "a maddeningly enticing read . . . an amazing feat of literary engineering" (The Independent on Sunday).
The Flamethrowers
Rachel Kushner - 2013
Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world—artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging actions in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro’s family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow. The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner’s brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.
Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
Mary Oliver - 2010
Swan, her twentieth volume, shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly: the acorn that hides within it an entire tree; the wings of the swan like the stretching light of the river; the frogs singing in the shallows; the mockingbird dancing in air. Swan is Oliver’s tribute to “the mortal way” of desiring and living in the world, to which the poet is renowned for having always been “totally loyal.” As the Los Angeles Times noted, innumerable readers go to Oliver’s poetry “for solace, regeneration and inspiration.” Few poets express the immense complexities of human experience as skillfully, or capture so memorably the smallest nuances. Speaking, for example, of stones, she writes, “the little ones you can / hold in your hands, their heartbeats / so secret, so hidden it may take years / before, finally, you hear them.” It is no wonder Oliver ranks, according to the Weekly Standard, “among the finest poets the English language has ever produced.”
Mount Allegro: A Memoir of Italian American Life
Jerre Gerlando Mangione - 1998
Jerre Mangione's autobiographical chronicle of his youth in a Sicilian community in Rochester is one of the truly enduring books about the immigrant experience in this country. Family squabbles, soul-nourishing food, and the casting of evil eyes are only some of the ingredients of this richly textured book, although they must all take second place to its unforgettable characters. As Eugene Paul Nassar writes in the book's Foreword, Mount Allegro . . . gave a literary visibility and identity, amiable and appealing, to a poorly understood ethnic group in America, and did so at a very high level of artistry.
Blood & Beauty: The Borgias
Sarah Dunant - 2013
When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family—in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia—in order to succeed.Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest—though increasingly unstable—weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player.
The Cold War: A New Oral History of Life Between East and West
Bridget Kendall - 2017
It spanned the globe - from Greece to China, Hungary to Cuba - and lasted for almost half a century. It has shaped political relations to this day, drawing new physical and ideological boundaries between East and West.In this meticulously researched account, Bridget Kendall explores the Cold War through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand. Alongside in-depth analysis that explains the historical and political context, the book draws on exclusive interviews with individuals who lived through the conflict's key events, offering a variety of perspectives that reveal how the Cold War was experienced by ordinary people. From pilots making food drops during the Berlin Blockade and Japanese fishermen affected by H-bomb testing to families fleeing the Korean War and children whose parents were victims of McCarthy's Red Scare, The Cold War covers the full geographical and historical reach of the conflict.Accompanying a landmark BBC Radio 4 series, A New Oral History of Life Between East and West is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how the tensions of the last century have shaped the modern world, and what it was like to live through them.
Murder in a Nice Neighborhood
Lora Roberts - 1994
Since she'd had words with the victim hours before, the police type her as the murderer--unless she's got a better alternative. Not easy for a determined loner like Liz, who has few friends and apparently one dangerous enemy. Luckily, her friends are more numerous than she suspected: the shrewd old ladies in her writing workshop, a charming real estate developer, and maybe even handsome detective Paul Drake--if he gets over thinking she's the killer. Yet none of them knows Liz quite as well as they think--and her past is closing in with a vengeance....
SARK's Journal and Play! Book
S.A.R.K. - 1993
Your "inside child" will peek out to want, wish, find pleasure, and amaze you. "We need your creative spirit in action," says SARK, "because there is only one of you. . . . So share your dreams and let them get really big."
The Sun and Other Stars
Brigid Pasulka - 2013
Frustrated and lonely, Etto is faced with the seemingly impossible prospect of cobbling together the remaining pieces of his life, including his mostly nonexistent relationship with his father, the town butcher. Things begin to change for Etto when Yuri Fil, a scandal-ridden Ukrainian soccer star and his tough-love sister, Zhuki, arrive in town, and sweep him into their universe of soccer, celebrity, laughter, and fierce loyalty. Under their influence, Etto begins to reconstruct his relationship with his father and learns a few life lessons: that perhaps the game of soccer isn’t just a waste of time—and that San Benedetto, his father, love, and life itself might have more to offer him than he ever believed possible.
The Days of Abandonment
Elena Ferrante - 2002
It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.
Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli - 2019
Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained--or lost in the desert along the way.As the family drives--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure--both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.
Stumbling through Italy: Tales of Tuscany, Sicily, Sardinia, Apulia, Calabria and places in-between
Niall Allsop - 2010
when, finally reconciled to the inevitable, they returned to Italy one last time.Which, as they say, is another story.Also includes chapters on the idiosyncrasies of the Italian language and the Italian driving experience.
Another Woman
Penny Vincenzi - 1994
By morning she had vanished--without apparent cause, and without a trace. Shocked, anxious, and uncomprehending, the two families face a long day of revelations, as a complex, fragile web of sexual, marital, and financial secrets is ripped apart by Cressida's disappearance.
A Footpath in Umbria: Learning, Loving and Laughing in Italy
Nancy Yuktonis Solak - 2010
As ordinary boomers, they simply wanted to experience “The Dream” – to live in Italy. They settled down in traditional Umbria, just east of Tuscany.Constrained by a strict budget, their experience took on challenges as diverse as getting accustomed to the vagaries of Italian appliances to gathering their own wood. Transportation was by train, bus, bicycle or footpath. What neither of them knew when they began was how the adventure would challenge their habits, upbringing, and outlook on life. Most surprising of all was how the experience would challenge their relationship to each other.A Footpath in Umbria is a celebration of the joys and revelations to be found by changing venues, whether it’s living in another country or simply venturing cross town.