Against a backdrop of immigration,
racial hostility, broken loyalties and modest dreams,
this bold-hearted and masterful first novel centers
on a single day—August 15, 1953—in an Italian
neighborhood in an Ohio community. Salvatore Scibona
intertwines searing portraits of six key characters
whose tragic stories are leavened by the beauty of the
author's craftsmanship, his structural dexterity and
his daring wit.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Salvatore Scibona’s fiction
has been published in the Threepenny Review, Best
New American Voices 2004, and The Pushcart
Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century
of the Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, he is the writing coordinator at the Fine
Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
ABOUT
THE BOOK(from the publisher)
A small, incongruous man receives
an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a
P.O.W. camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day
of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an
Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco
LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal
devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to
come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely
drawn characters we meet in the carnival crowd, each
of whom will come to their own unique conclusion on
this day.
The End follows them
across the seven preceding decades—an elderly
abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage
boy, a jeweler—and dramatically into the heart
of a crime that will twist all of their lives. Against
a background of immigration, broken family loyalties
and racial hostility, we at last return to August 15,
l953, and see everything Rocco saw—and vastly
more—through the eyes of the people in the crowd.
AUTHOR APPEARANCES
Pittsburgh
Date: Friday, June 5, 2009
Time: 8pm
Event: Reading at Gist Street
Venue: Gist Street Reading Series
James Simon's Sculpture Studio
305 Gist Street (in Uptown)
Pittsburgh, PA
From The End by Salvatore
Scibona. Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
He was five feet one inch tall
in street shoes, bearlike in his round and jowly face,
hulking in his chest and shoulders, nearly just as stout
around the middle, but hollow in the hips, and lacking
a proper can to sit on (though he was hardly ever known
to sit), and wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny
feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb. He was faintly
green-skinned, psoriatic about the elbows and the backs
of knees, his shaven cheeks untouched by scars of any
sort, faithful to a fault to his daily labors, grudgeless
against the wicked world, thankful for it, even; a baker
of breads with and without seeds, modest cakes, seasonal
frosted treats; supplier to all neighborhoods and occasional
passers-through; a reader of the p.m. papers, as all
of his vocation are, born on the feast of Saint Lucy,
1895; a prideful Ohioan; a sucker of caramel candies
when cigarettes he forbade himself from eight o’clock
to two; possessor of a broad and seamless brow and a
head of sleek black undulant hair, the eyes goonish,
unnaturally pale and blue, set deep in the skull in
swollen rain-clouded pouches, the eyes of one poisoned
with lead, who had not in all his days addressed a piece
of speech to more than two persons at once; a looker-right-through-you
if he pleased, as old cats look, accustomed to suffering
the company of others but always in need of privacy;
the baker of Elephant Park; an unambitious businessman;
a soul liberated from worry by luck and self-conquest;
a weakhearted sparer of the rod with his boys; a measured
drinker of spirits who prayed daily for the salvation
of his sons and wife; a smoker nevertheless immune to
colds and grippes; an ignorer of the weather; a lover
of streaks, content and merciful; an unremarkable Christian.
From The End by Salvatore
Scibona. Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
