An Annotated Bibliography of Italian American Studies

Fiction

Page 12:  from Cuomo to Di Bartolomeo

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Cuomo, George.  Sing Choirs of Angels. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

[Thirteen stories about American people in various situations written in Cuomo’s characteristic serio-comic style.]

 

---. Family Honor: an American Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983.

[From his family’s arrival in the early 1900s through his rise in the labor movement, Vinny Sirola tries to do what he has to be become American without dishonoring family. A saga of Italian immigration and Cuomo’s major contribution to Italian-American Literature.]

 

---. Trial by Water. New York: Random House, 1993.

[The story of the love of a father for a son caught up in a school rivalry gone deadly. Through the investigation of the drowning of two kids on prom night, we come to learn, as does the father, the competing influences that society and family have on a young man and that the ways of the past can be both useful and harmful when applied to the present.]

 

D’Agostino, Guido. Olives on the Apple Tree. New York: Doubleday, 1940.

[An Italian-American family moves out of the ghetto in the vain hopes of becoming Americans by abandoning their Italian culture.]

 

D’Agostino, Lorenzo. Mara and the Priest. Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1975.

[Set in Spain during the fascist/communist civil war, this novel focuses on the love a woman has for a man turned priest.]

 

D’Alfonso, Antonio. Fabrizio’s Passion. Toronto: Guernica, 1995.

[This baroque novel explores the different facets of an Italian family living in North America. A half-century of the private lives recounted during the month of April of each year.]

 

D’Amato, Brian. Beauty. New York: Delacorte Press, 1992.

[A fictional portrait of an artist as a young maniac who does illegal plastic surgery on the side.]

 

D’Angelo, Lou. What the Ancients Said. New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1971.

[The oral history of an ancestral past haunts the Americanization of a soldier returning from World War II.]

 

De Capite, Michael. Maria. New York: The John Day Co, 1943.

[An arranged marriage leads to a life of difficulty for a young woman born of Italian immigrants.]

 

---. No Bright Banner. New York: The John Day Company, 1944.

[The coming-of-age story of a young boy in a Cleveland little Italy who leaves home for college, spends time in Greenwich Village of the late 1930s and achieves an American identity.]

 

De Capite, Raymond. The Coming of Fabrizze. New York: David McKay Co., 1960.

[An immigrant revitalizes an Italian-American town in the 1920s and becomes a folk hero.]

 

---. A Lost King. New York: David McKay Company, Inc, 1961.

[A son living with his widowed father struggles to adjust to modern life.]

 

De Grazia, Emilio. Enemy Country. St. Paul, MN: New Rivers Press, 1984.

[Stories connected around the issues obsessing America during the Vietnam war.]

 

Del Vecchio, John M. The 13th Valley. New York: Bantam, 1982.

[One of the best novels of the Viet Nam War experience. The story is set in 1970 and deals the 101st Airborne Unit.]

 

---. Carry Me Home. New York: Bantam, 1995.

[The return home of three Viet Nam vets, one who is Italian American to the country that failed them.]

 

Demarsky, Lina del Tinto. Leaven of the Pharisees. New York: Bedford Press, 1991.

[Demarsky takes us slowly through the agonizing experience of a woman’s attempts to please both her family and the outsider whose love can take her out of range of the family’s influence.]

 

DeMille, Nelson. Gold Coast. New York: Warner Books, 1990.

[A mafia Don faces off against a WASP Wall Street lawyer in this main selection of the Book of the Month Club.]

 

De Rosa, Tina. Paper Fish. Chicago: The Wine Press, 1980.

[An impressionistic rendition of a young girl’s coming of age in a dying Chicago "Little Italy."]

 

de Vries, Rachel Guido. tender warriors. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1986.]

[An exploration of a dysfunctional family’s attempt to survive the loss of the mother who held them all together.]

 

Di Bartolomeo, Albert. The Vespers Tapes. New York: The Walker Co, 1991.

[The story of Vincent Vespers, a school teacher and younger brother of Frank, a local hood loyal to Don Tucci. Tucci, a dying gangleader, would like to set his life straight through an autobiography told to and to be written by Vincent.]

----.  Fools Gold. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

[A crime novel which tells the story of a Philadelphia man whose child was murdered, whose wife abandons him, whose new lover is kidnapped and saved by a homeless street kid. In the end, the protagonist creates a truly postmodern family.]

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