Wild Dreams

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 piecesfiction, memoir, poetry, story, and interviewthat range widely in style and sentiment, tracing the arc of an immigrant cultures coming of age in America. What stories do Italian Americans tell about themselves? How do some of Americas best writers deal with complicated questions of identity in their art? Organized by provocative themesAncestors, The Sacred and the Profane, Love and Anger, Birth and Death, Art and Selfthe selections document the evolution of Italian-American literature. From John Fantes My Fathers 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 piecesincluding an unforgettable interview with Camille Pagliaare Italian-American takes on the culture at large.