Bücher der Reihe Crossings

"In the heart of Central Park there is an angel. It is the Angel of the Waters statue, which appeared on the Bethesda Fountain on May 31, 1873. It has since earned a place among the city's icons-a deserved place for its classical beauty, although not everyone knows that it is much more: a symbol of love, harmony, healing, and rebirth, as the historical motivation for its creation affirms." This is the story of the angel and the artist who created it.

"Set between the Netherlands and the end of western Liguria, Marino Magliani traces a geography of the humane and the forlorn, of panoramas and yearning. "A Window to Zeewijk" is the story of a changing landscapes, of houses with lifespans shorter than that their inhabitants. A chance encounter leads readers down trails of joy and melancholy, as everything seems to be in Zeewijk"--

I have often been asked by Italians: "Who are these Italian Americans? Why don''t they speak Italian like us? Why don''t they read the same books we read? Why don''t they behave like us? Why do they serve a lunch of spaghetti with meat balls as if it were an Italian dish instead of the sorry marriage of a Swedish recipe with an Italian one?" As I said earlier, Italian Americans bear the wrong name. They are not a mixture of Italy and America: they are Italians lost in America.-from the foreword

A self-deprecating, sobering book about a world that continues to move forward without anyone really advancing. -Gian Paolo Serino As Europe, along with the rest of the world, struggles to learn itself anew and adapt in the presence of rapid demographic change - and often acting in a way that fails to recognize the positive potential in this change - Kossi Komla-Ebri provides a human and personal account of this global process which sometimes seems too big, global, and too daunting. Komla-Ebri's vignettes show us through pain and humor what this giant global force looks like when it comes out in the everyday, rears its heads in the interactions between friends or strangers, the intimate or the unfamiliar. By shedding light on the relationship between the structural and the interpersonal, he takes deeply personal issues and makes them universal. Komla-Ebri shows us that we are all touched by what may feel abstract or too broad for the individual to reproduce and affect. All people who have experienced embar-race-ments and othering - which is increasingly all people - should find this book enlightening. And by reflecting our own behavior back to us or teaching us how to cope with and process these daily slights, this work helps us put one foot in front of the other toward a world of greater belonging. -Dr. john a. powell, Hass Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society

The odyssey recounted within these pages traverses time and space in order to bear witness to an individual's developing artistry and commitment to political activism. In doing so, Kento chronicles the ongoing dynamics involving the potential of rap music's Italianate permutations and the legacy of a progressive, left cultural politics-what Antonio Gramsci called the national-political-to renounce such societal ills as neo-fascism, xenophobic racism, and misogynistic violence plaguing twenty-first century Italy. Kento's sonic resistance offers a model in which an informed individual's action and artistry contribute to a larger movement.-Joseph Sciorra, from the introduction