Books published by Bordighera Press

Fiction. A collection of newspaper columns written over a four-year span, MOUSTACHE PETE IS DEAD is an insightfully keen look into the world of the Italian immigrant. Through Pete's words, we come to understand the difficulties many immigrants and their progeny have often had in order to negotiate the dominant culture's misunderstanding of the immigrant's culture of origin. MOUSTACHE PETE IS DEAD calls for the birth of a smooth partnership between these two different cultures.

OA discreet connoisseur of Italian poetry of this century will quickly see in Ruffilli's verses the continuity of a noble tradition, made of refined poverty, of contracted music, up to the extreme limit of inaudibility, . . . and he will think, then, of certain tangents, even thematic, between the present story and the unforgettable story of Annina in "Seme del piangere."ONGiovanni Raboni.

Tamburri takes a look back at the representation of the Italian and Italian American in the United States' film world. He includes some specific readings of four distinct examples of recent modes of production and/or interpretation. Films discussed in this section are: "The House I Live In, The Godfather, Golden Door" and three short films as example of an unsung genre.

This edition collects the author's published reviews during a 10-year period, from 1995-2005.

Barone, a professor of English and director of the American Studies Program at Saint Joseph College, presents a study of Italian-American narrative.

Nonfiction. Italian American Studies. The large majority of the twenty million Italian Americans are law-abiding, hard-working, and accomplished. Yet the image of Italian Americans is often distorted by stereotypes portrayed in popular media. PROFILES OF ITALIAN AMERICANS: ACHIEVING THE DREAM AND GIVING BACK counters those stereotypes with brief sketches of Italian Americans who have achieved success and enriched the lives of others. Included are the well known, such as Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York, and the less known, such as Betty DellaCorte, founder of the first shelter for victims of domestic violence. The collection features A.P. Giannini, who sifted through the rubble following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and established the bank known today as Bank of America, as well as Frances Xavier Cabrini, who founded orphanages, schools, and hospitals for the poor throughout the United States. These thirty-two profiles illustrate a range of Italian American contributions in the arts, business, education, law enforcement, media, medicine, the military, philanthropy, public service, research, science, and sports. This book celebrates with unabashed pride the impressive legacy of Italian American culture.

Poetry. Trilingual Edition. Translated from the original English into the Italian by Chiara Curtoni, and into the Sicilian by Nino Provenzano. With engravings by Michael McCurdy. "Truly an homage to the sonnet form of the Sicilian School, the nine poems in A NEW LIFE WITH BIANCA are vibrant with contemporary clarity of word and thought; yet, the sonnets embrace the poetic form of Iacopo da Lentini, an innovative poet of another era. This trilingual work is a gift of life and yearnings well expressed and clearly up-to-date, yet enveloped in long standing literary tradition. For a reader who loves the richness and expressive possibilities of the English language, the musicality of Italian in the translations by Dr. Chiara Curtoni added pleasure, and the Sicilian versions by Nino Provenzano went straight to the heart."--Giovanna Bellia La Marca "Frank Polizzi's sonnet series is a discourse among three cultures. He honors the history of the sonnet form by having his original English text translated into Sicilian and Italian. Polizzi has cleverly distilled the history of the sonnet into a voice that speaks simultaneously in three languages: the original medieval Sicilian sonneteer, the Dante of La Vita Nuova, and the modern descendent of this still living and evolving form. Polizzi's sonnets mirror the tradition they succinctly annotate, from Platonic love and erotic sex to betrayal, loss, and death. In the end, Polizzi's Bianca is as unattainable as Dante's Beatrice. Thoughtful as well as inspired, Polizzi has added yet another dimension to the tradition of the sonnet."--Ken Scambray "As if love itself decided it could not to be conveyed in only one language, Frank Polizzi follows its lead and puts forth a poignant multilingual collection of nine love sonnets in A NEW LIFE WITH BIANCA. Polizzi pays homage to th

Drama. Italian Studies. Translated from the Italian by Thomas Simpson. In its first founding manifestoes of the 1980s, Teatro delle Albe defined itself as "Politttttttical Theatre," with seven t's, to declare with irreverent irony its distance from the era's reigning, ideologically muscle-bound political theatre, turgid and smug in its certainties and judgements. Because in Italian the word 'politico' means 'political' but the word 'polittico,' with two t's, means 'polyptych' - that is, a painting consisting of multiple images - the invention of the ironic term 'politttttttico' also intended to trumpet the urgency of observing Italy's community (the polis) from multiple viewpoints, fixing a fiercely ingenuous gaze on a plural reality. Unafraid of finding surprise in the ordinary, the company declared that it would create theatrical actions composed of multifaceted representations, aimed at an audience in search of questions rather than confirmation of received thought. "The heretical approach to politically committed theatre carries on in RUMORE DI ACQUE, the monologue composed in 2010 by Teatro delle Albe's playwright and director, Marco Martinelli."--Franco Nasi

Poetry. "In poems of remarkable fortitude and clarity, Marisa Frasca, a self-described "hyphenated woman," navigates the passages, geographical and psychological, that allow her uneasy flow between Sicily and America, among all 'our known / and unknown mothers.' This journey in which the Atlantic transforms into 'the old dark and narrow hallway of the immigrant' is always less familiar than we might anticipate as these poems conflate past and present, 'the displaced, the incomplete, / the made new / superimposed and piled together in chorus.' Like Nino Rota, Frasca conveys depths of sorrow and wonder in her rich, musical phrasings. The poems of VIA INCANTO are operatic with breath and sex and thirst and love."--Michael Waters "Frasca's vision and passion are so arrived, so rich with variation, that they elevate us inside a lyric adventure. Vittorini's 'twice real' reveries and Pavese's story-poem architectures whisper like companions to Frasca's native and chosen places: Sicily, the Atlantic, her beloved Manhattan--all fueling the book's narrative aesthetic and elegant shapes. But her darkroom--part time-capsule, part temple--steals everything. It tests the heart with fire and compression, and it tests all of us with razor-sharp memory. Then it gives back a shining array of immortal human faces and stories, indelibly. VIA INCANTO is a luminous original."--Judith Vollmer