Bücher veröffentlicht von Bordighera Press

. . . the shift from Eugeniös main student interest in science in favor of theoretical philosophy, on one hand, and his post-graduation "German period," on the other (along with the visible maturation of his political awareness), in the end led Colorni to pursue in depth the study of Leibniz¿s original texts. It is therefore possible that his postgraduate thesis, The Youthful Philosophy of Leibniz (1933), contained some foretaste of what would later become a key feature of Colorni¿s Leibniz studies-"translating" Leibniz¿s work into modern terms, so as to make it accessible to contemporary philosophers.-From the IntroductionThe Leibniz Compromise captures the intellectual shift in the thinking and writing of Eugenio Colorni, foreshadowing the work to come.

"As one travels through this concise, engaging cultural autobiography, as I would call it, of Marra's many experiences, one realizes that he was much more than an observer. If by "observe," we mean to notice and thus perceive something, understand it as being significant, and then act on it, we see that Marra was indeed a keen onlooker. At times, a fly on the wall, other times, an active participant. His work for NIAF and OSIA, especially, are testimony to these two roles he has and continues to play over the thirty-plus years among Italians and Italian Americans."-from the Foreword by Anthony Julian Tamburri

In that topsy-turvy logic of the Roverso Mondo (the Upside-Down World) mountains are made of cheese, rivers flow with wine, labor is abolished, and pleasure rules in a fantastical place of abundance, the gastronomic utopia known as il Paese di Cuccagna (the Land of Cockaigne). Forming the mythic core of a centuries-old dream of plenty, it came to be closely associated with America. When mass migration was possible, the dream brought millions of the destitute to this and other continents, where they believed they would never go hungry again. Perpetuated by street performers, illustrated in penny broadsides, and narrated in folktales-how far had this oral tradition taken a people! The "abbondanza" mantra, functioning as a prayer, protected generations of diaspora Italians from the fear of hunger. Their Cuccagnesque worldview persisted and a veritable food obsession helped them create domestic landscapes of plenty in groaning wine cellars, gardens, kitchens, deep freezers, and pantries, contributing to the festivalization of the quotidian, and to the many actual festive reenactments of abundance. Some rituals, such as the Sicilian celebration of St. Joseph, with its pageant of the Holy Family and open table, commemorate immigrant journeys and their search for hospitality, even as they aim to welcome the stranger and feed the poor. This volume reviews four decades of the author's research, writing, and programming within this Italian and diaspora food nexus, including her reflections on the cycle of hunger, the search for abundance, the practice and achievement of abundance. Currently inhabiting a Land of Enough, she also ponders how the COVID-19 pandemic helped shift this multigenerational trauma discourse of scarcity and abundance, contributed to her involvement in food justice initiatives, and broke the mantra's spell.

In summer of 1965, Christopher Ricci's mother has runaway. Unable to take care of him, his father decides to leave the thirteen year old with his own sister in upstate New York. In this poignant coming of age novel, Chris tries his best to adapt to life in rural New York, navigate first love, and make sense of his changing world.

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Italian Studies. I love this collection of essays by Maria Terrone, an exceptionally talented woman of Italian American ancestry who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, with maternal roots firmly established, as she shows us, in Sicily's long history. Subtly crafted, witty, honest, it brings to life a New York one instantly recognizes. Her New York is an international city, ranging from the factories of Long Island City to a Fifth Avenue beauty company to shooting ranges to Catholic schools, a world where a woman might lose herself in preparing foods from many countries, to hunting down out-of-this world watches, gloves and shoes, while taking those graffiti-soaked subways to summer jobs in New York's cubicles and windowless offices. All of it memorably realized here on page after page in a language which only really fine poets can evoke, realizing for us, her lucky readers, a world shared in truth by so many of us.--Paul Mariani

"The Mercury Man" is a collection of thirty-six memoir narratives about growing up on the streets of Brooklyn in an Italian working-class family in the 1950s and early '60s with his doo-wop singing, gang fighting, sexually provocative, and drug abusing crew. In this intimate collection, Frank Gioia shines a light on the offbeat, unusual, and destructive with the sounds and texture of an earlier time and place.

With rugged verse "like a strega's curse," Angelo Zeolla navigates the stoops and alleyways of the Bronx through worlds of languages, dialects, culturesa, and more. "The Bronx Unbound" is a kaleidoscopic collection, unveiling the Mediterranean dwelling in that infamous New York borough and "the realization that civilization/is eternally Caught up in the/flux."

This multi-genre collection explores and unravels the complexities of "home" as a physical and cultural space, and as a contested condition of being. Drawing on personal experience as well as on the stories of ancestors, Luisa Giulianetti shares the lives of characters mired in loss and grief, those with their feet in two worlds, and others who try-however imperfectly-to fashion home from inherited ruins and imagined futures.

Joseph Tusiani: Poet, Translator, Humanist. An International Homage pays tribute to a leading figure of Italian culture in the United States. Joseph Tusiani has been an active poet, translator, and humanist for the entire second half of the twentieth century. The scholars honor all aspects of Professor Tusiani's intellectual and cultural career: most especially his translations from the Italian and his own poetry in English, Italian, and Latin. This volume closes with the first-time publication of his play in verse If Gold Should Rust, introduced by poet and critic Felix Stefanile.

"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.

THE GIOVANNI SCHIAVO SERIES is, to echo its namesake, "an attempt to rescue from oblivion," the work of the founders of Italian American and Italian Diaspora studies as an academic discipline. The field has expanded greatly, especially during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century; as a result, a plethora of contemporary works fill the shelves of scholars, readers, and university libraries. However, many of the classics remain out of print. Hence, in the spirit of Giovanni Schiavo, who sought to highlight the experience of Italian Americans' forgotten past, we seek to do the same but with scholarly works on Italian American subjects. Our mission is to re-shed light on works that are no longer easily accessible or widely read. Plans include the creation of "readers" for some of the fi eld's founders and, hopefully, a collection from contemporary scholars analyzing the founders of the fi eld. We hope you enjoy the current reprint and continue to support our endeavor.

One of Alain Elkann's most intimate books, this is a story told through diary entries that lovingly and demurely investigate his mother's illness and death. From the warning signs of illness to the traumatic experience of the intensive care unit to the closing moments of the funeral, these are memories that emerge as simple and precise, highlighting a son's rebellion and helplessness in the face of his mother's demise. This is a meditation on death and it's ability to still catch us unprepared, leaving behind a void that even time is never able to fill.

WINNER OF THE 2022 LAURIA/FRASCA POETRY PRIZESicilianas, an admirable work of imagination, creates a space where we-like the characters in its poems-live uneasily. It's a space of myth and nightmare, where ghosts are more vivid than the living, the dreamed more important than the lived. Over and over, in these evocations of twentieth-century Sicilian immigrants and their descendants, facts yield to emotional truths. Women dominate these stories: their bravery, their fears, their transcendence, their legacy. The astute mingles with the sensory, the complex thought with the heartrending cry. Manizza Roszak has an exquisite lyricism, an ear for the music and tension of the line, which gives her poems the power to render "the lives / of the loved played over / for us as they might / have been."-Kathleen Ossip, distinguished judge

Nicholas A. DiChario's Giovanni's Tree: New Italian Folktales is a wildly imaginative book and an important contribution to Italian-American stories. In this collection, DiChario honors the traditional folktale form, while taking the genre in new and exciting directions. DiChario's fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Hugo awards, among others, and his stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century.

Nel parlare di "luoghi della memoria" il primo riferimento è spesso a siti di interesse storico legati ad avvenimenti di carattere bellico. Tuttavia l'espressione "luoghi di memoria" racchiude nella sua matrice semantica una valenza assai più articolata. Un luogo di memoria può essere inteso come una unità significativa, tanto di ordine materiale che ideale, che la volontà degli esseri umani o il lavorio del tempo hanno reso elemento simbolico di una qualche comunità.-dall'introduzione

The weaver's shuttle turns at the death of Gia Falcini's mother, when Gia's estranged father in Italy sends a scarf whose unusual qualities could revive Gia's ailing fabric shop in Boston's North End. Goaded by conflicting desires, Gia journeys to her father's village and the stepfamily she has never met, a vibrant local fabric mill, and Italy's style capital. The adventure could shred Gia's ambitions or offer a legacy worth taking away.

There exists still ... the notion that [Italian Americans] continue to be one of the very few ethnic groups as targets of microaggressions if not outright discrimination with no consequences to those who engage in such acts.... It is both an internal and external challenge; and in both cases I am convinced that education is the best way we can (1) better inform ourselves of our own history in the United States, and (2) enlighten the non-Italian American about our history and the many challenges immigrants faced. That said, Italian Americans must step up to the plate and support grand projects such as a worthy Italian/American museum at the national level, endowed professorships, and centers, as well as other entities and/or institutions dedicated to imparting knowledge of our history and culture, and, in the end, a veritable Italian/American "think tank." This ultimately brings us to the dire need for private, cultural philanthropy.-from the "Introduction"

"During his sojourn, the Maestro kept a notebook in which he recorded everything that caught his eye, from the natives' peculiar manners and dialect to the fast-changing scenery on his walks along picturesque trails. These notes and impressions gave way to poems, illustrations, and storylines, all merging into a seemingly experimental text encompassing graphic art, fiction, and autobiography. The Coazze Notebook, as it came to be known, is a compendium of literary criticism, illuminating and emotionally charged personal reflections, vernacular expressions, and sharply observed geographical descriptions. The notes are fragmentary, and occasionally embellished, but they shed light on Pirandello's mode of thought and, in particular, how the ideas he gathered from real life were incorporated into his writing."-From the Introduction by Lisa Sarti

Our Lively Kingdom is a poetry collection in four parts, navigating love, children, art, and death. It is poetry of life lived: "and the day begins again, un-remembering and un-making//that which must be felt again each night, the question repeating/and the question being answered." With patience and passion, Julia Lisella writes about the fragility of life fleeting and the interminableness of a prayer.

New York, 1910. Pasquale D'Angelo, a sixteen-year-old native of Abruzzo, arrives at Ellis Island together with his father and a group of their companions in search of a better life. The shock of the New World is brutal, one of the worst experienced by our emigrants; but at the same time, for Pasquale (who becomes "Pascal") it's powerfully attractive, electrifying. Unlike his buddies, whose sole aim is to improve their condition and to send some money back home to their families in Italy, Pascal develops a desire to become a writer, an American poet. In order to do so, he studies English assiduously, night and day, utilizing every free moment he gets during his merciless schedule at work as a stone cutter, a manual laborer, a pick and shovel man. With titanic amounts of perseverance and an indestructible faith in poetry, Pascal will carry on until he reaches the limit of his sufferings. Over time, he will become convinced of having a mission that he has been destined for since birth, with a responsibility to obey his internal voice in the face of the enormously difficult life circumstances and countless sacrifices he must bear, of a new language learned with a crumbling Webster's Dictionary and with the help of sublime teachers like Keats and Shelley-teachers who light the way along his path and give him the strength to keep going. It's a promethean struggle, made more difficult by crippling poverty, a struggle that will lead the young stone cutter to leave his friends after a long and exhausting stint of manual labor and to retreat in the end to a miserable hovel in Brooklyn in order to take on the challenge of New York City and the "god" that rules it.

Art, aesthetics, literary criticism, and political science are fields that are today scarcely recognized (though they were originally long pursued) among the truly extraordinary intellectual exploits of the great Italian philosopher and political activist Eugenio Colorni. The present volume intends, at least in part, to fill this gap. It reveals first and foremost the anti-fascist inspiration which from the beginning animated Colorni in the pages of the Genoese Gobettian young-people's review Pietre, especially in its second series edited by Lelio Basso. It presents three of Colorni's essays on aesthetics (two of them unpublished and rediscovered by Mario Quaranta), initially developed in the framework of the teachings of G.A. Borgese, which respectively concern the work of Roberto Ardig¿, Bergsonism, and Benedetto Croce (the latter in the definitive version - L'estetica di Benedetto Croce. Studio Critico - published as a monograph as early as 1932). It brings together many of the young Colorni's reviews of articles concerning these disciplines and others, such as law and philosophy. Through the courtesy of Signora Eva Hirschmann Monteforte, it also includes many of Colorni's opinions as an involuntary literary critic, taken from his correspondence with his wife Ursula Hirschmann during his imprisonment and confinement. Finally, the volume closes with two novellas that he wrote as an adult.