The Swallows of Lunetto

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I drew, of course, on personal experience, on my time in Italy, on family legends, on reading, on breathing, on life. And all the while, as those gnarled roots were stirring in the darkness, I felt the terror and the splendor of the inevitable blossoming. From Joseph Fasano, the acclaimed author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, comes The Swallows of Lunetto, the powerful story of a young couple's escape from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War. He had been broken so many times, first by war and then by the wars within him, but he had prevailed. That’s all there is, to prevail. something like that is perhaps beyond words. It’s a monstrous thing. And such things are only given a shape later. In the story we tell. from the Swallows of Lunetto by Joseph Fasano Face coverings are required of all staff and attendees when inside the store. Masks must snugly cover nose and mouth.

Fasano's first novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, was published in 2020 to critical acclaim. [10] [11] [12] [13] His second novel, The Swallows of Lunetto, became a viral social media sensation during his 2023 European book tour, covered by the BBC, the Evening Standard, The Independent, and other media. [14] [15] [16]

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And yet we never have nothing. We always have what we have tried to do. Always. Somewhere in us, our lives and our works ripen in secret.

The novel considers ageless questions about the source of human evil and how society and individuals respond, about personal guilt and forgiveness. And it is about love that looks deep into another’s soul and, with an almost relentless insistence, points out the path to wholeness. Harvard Book Store welcomes JOSEPH FASANO, award-winning author, songwriter, and professor at Columbia University and Manhattanville College, for a discussion of his new novel The Swallows of Lunetto. A Return to In-Person Events In 2011, Fasano's first book, Fugue for Other Hands, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. [8] It was nominated for the Kate Tufts Poetry Award and the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award." His second collection of poems, Inheritance, was released in May 2014. In 2015, Fasano published Vincent, a book-length poem based very loosely on the 2008 killing of Tim McLean by Vince Li on a Greyhound Bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on the Trans Canada Highway. [9] His fourth collection of poems, The Crossing, was released in 2018.

Joseph Fasano is the author of the novels The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the "20 Best Small Press Books of 2020." His books of poetry include The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024), The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and a nomination for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year." And then they blossomed. It’s difficult to explain just how this happened—it’s mysterious even, or perhaps especially, to me—but somehow, after years of laboring on two abandoned manuscripts (still I’m not sure if I abandoned them or they abandoned me), the path was clear before me. I knew what I had to do. I was thrilled to read this book before its release date as an ARC and I’m so excited for it to be introduced to the public. I wanted to write a review ASAP because I see the anticipation growing here on Goodreads! It is worth the wait, and well worth the anticipation.

Alexandra Bianchi lives and works in Lunetto, a provincial village in Italy's Calabria region, which finds itself ravaged by war in the summer of 1945. Leonardo Gemetti, a young man from Lunetto, has been missing for nearly eight years, and all his village knows of him is that he has carried out an atrocity against the Italian partisans in Mussolini's fallen Republic of Salò. When Alexandra meets a masked figure in the streets of Lunetto, she cannot imagine what she will learn about history and her place in it. Fasano's poems have appeared in the Yale Review, the Southern Review, FIELD, Tin House, Boston Review, Measure, Passages North, the American Literary Review, and other publications. [7] The Swallows of Lunetto is not a story of war, exactly. It is a story, in part, of war’s aftermath, of what happens when a young man looks up from his youth and realizes, with horror, what he has done. And it is a story of the love and forgiveness that just might be possible not only in spite of but because of the ways in which we have erred.

From Joseph Fasano, the acclaimed author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, comes The Swallows of Lunetto, the powerful story of a young couple’s escape from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War.

Italy, 1945: Alexandra Bianchi lives and works in Lunetto, a provincial village in Italy's Calabria region, which finds itself ravaged by war. Leonardo Gemetti, a young man from Lunetto, has been missing for nearly eight years, and all his village knows of him is that he has carried out an atrocity against the Italian partisans in Mussolini's fallen Republic of Salò. When Alexandra meets a masked figure in the streets of Lunetto, she cannot imagine what she will learn about history and her place in it.This, of course, meant research. Though sometimes in this life of mine I have failed to live voraciously, I have always read voraciously—it is a drug for me, a necessity, a love—and very often I am reading of history. The history of war, in particular, fascinates me, telling as it does the terrible story of what we can do to one another, and thereby teaching us, if we can listen, the ways to avoid catastrophe when next it holds out its hand. A young woman in the village recalled the boy and connects with the man. She bears her own invisible scars. Her charcoal drawings reflect what she sees, the sea and her town and her sisters, and she studies them hoping to understand what she sees. To understand her life. Fasano seems to be always concerned with the archetypal webs of life and the characters really highlight the importance of that in his body of work - it’s all the more exciting to feel that relationship to the characters. They feel familiar not only because Italian culture feels warm and inviting, but because their stories and wisdom are in us - in some way - too. This is different from his previous novel which was concerned with just a few characters and moments of dialogue; this book moves differently and seems a new achievement for such a poetry-oriented author. He rises to the occasion.