Italian American Heritage Month

Two star-crossed lovers--Enza and Ciro--meet and separate, until, finally, the power of their love changes both of their lives forever. Set during the years preceding and during World War I.

It is August 15, 1953, the day of a street carnival in the Italian enclave of Elephant Park, Ohio, when Rocco LaGrassa receives an excruciating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. Against the background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, the story presents everything Rocco sees through the eyes of various characters in the crowd.

Giovanna Costa, reeling from personal tragedies, tries to make a new life for herself at the turn of the twentieth century in New York City's Little Italy. Her modest success is rewarded with the attention of the notorious Black Hand, a gang of brutal extortionists led by Lupo the Wolf.

"At sixty-six, Lorenzo Carcaterra finds it easier to reflect on the past than ruminate on the future. "By the time you reach my age," he writes, "you have witnessed too much loss to not be aware of what lies ahead." This turn to the past inspired a poignant memoir about the women who made him the man he is today. His Italian grandmother, Nonna Maria, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia,...

"Such a Pretty Girl is Nadina LaSpina's story--from her early years in her native Sicily, where still a baby she contracts polio, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness; to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals, where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her; to her rebellion and her activism in the disability...

"The innocence of childhood collides with the stark aftermath of war in this wrenching and ultimately redemptive tale of family, seemingly impossible choices, and the winding paths to destiny, which sometimes take us to places far beyond our imaginings." - Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours and The Book of Lost Friends Based on true events, a heartbreaking story of love, family, hope, and survival set in post-World...

Maria Laurino strips away stereotypes and nostalgia to tell the complicated, centuries-long story of the true Italian-American experience. Looking beyond the familiar caricatures fostered by popular culture, she tells the stories of Sicilian workers imported to replace the labor of freed slaves, the grim realities from which most immigrants came, the lynchings of Italian Americans, and the first uses of the word "mafia." Laurino shows how Italian...

"Today middle class consumers in the Americas drive the transatlantic trade in Italian foods associated with refined consumption--award-winning regional wines, herb infused olive oils, heirloom San Marzano canned tomatoes, syrupy balsamic vinegars, and pungent slabs of aged parmigiano cheese. At the same time, pizza and pasta are considered typical fare in the U.S. and Argentina. Both developments reflect major changes since the late 19th century...