Helen Barolini Books In Order

Novels

  1. Umbertina (1966)
  2. Love in the Middle Ages (1986)
  3. Visits (2016)

Collections

  1. More Italian Hours (2001)

Non fiction

  1. Festa (1988)
  2. Aldus and His Dream Book (1992)
  3. Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity (1995)
  4. A Circular Journey (2006)
  5. Their Other Side (2006)
  6. Making My Bones (2009)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Helen Barolini Books Overview

Umbertina

One of the first novels to explore Italian American women’s experience and an acknowledged contemporary classic of Italian American literature, Umbertina tells the richly detailed story of four generations of women. The novel follows Umbertina and her descendants from her roots in a Calabrian village through a period of American assimilation, to Umbertina‘s great granddaughters’ efforts to resolve the dilemma of their Italian American identity. When first published in 1979, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it ‘an important novel for these times…
. Through a dazzling interplay of American and Italian characters in both countries, Helen Barolini delineates the major concerns of all thinking American ethnics.’ This is no less true today, as this republication restores Umbertina to a reading public newly attuned to the complexities of cultural inheritance and identity.

‘An ambitious saga which spans the history and probes some of the tensions of the Italian American…
. panoramic, descriptive, and solidly crafted.’ Publisher’s Weekly

For course use in: ethnic literature, ethnic studies, gender studies, Italian American literature, literature of immigration, 20th century U.S. literature

Helen Barolini’s other works include the novel Love in the Middle Ages and Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity. She conceived and edited the volume The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women, winner of an American Book Award and a Susan Koppelman Award of the American Culture Association.

Love in the Middle Ages

In this second novel the author thoughtfully tackles the pain involved when loving together and living together turn out to be irreconcilable. The New York Times

Festa

Born of Italian American parents, Helen Barolini rediscovered her culinary heritage when she married Italian writer Antonio Barolini and lived for some years in Italy. Festa is a year long feast of memories and delicious, traditional Italian dishes from St. Nicholas sweetmeats in December and perciatelli with sardines and fennel for March’s St. Joseph s Day, to figs with prosciutto for summer s Ferragosto and pumpkin gnocchi for an American Thanksgiving in Italy.

Aldus and His Dream Book

A tribute to the life and work of the pioneering scholar publisher, Aldus Manutius 1449/50 1515. Helen Barolini’s text discusses Aldus, his education, his publishing vision, his typographic innovations, and his famous Venetian press. At the same time, this book reproduces all the illustrations, and many of the full pages, from the Aldine press edition of Francesco Colonna’s ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.’

Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity

A lively, lucid, and often extremely moving collection of essays. Sandra Gilbert, author of Wrongful Death: A Memoir Barolini’s essays moved me. Their commitment, their passion, their intelligence struck me very powerfully and made them among the most incisive essays on Italian Americana, ethnicity, and diversity in literature that I have ever read. Fred Misurella, author of Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs and Short Time Part memoir, part social commentary, and part literary criticism, Chiaroscuro is not only profoundly original but also of crucial importance in establishing the contours of an Italian American tradition. Spanning a quarter century of work, the essays in Helen Barolini s essays explore her personal search; literature as a formative influence; and the turning of the personal into the political. Included in Chiaroscuro is an updated re introduction to Barolini s American Book Award winning collection, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women.

A Circular Journey

A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America’s most distinctive voices. These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer’s life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini’s art. Divided into three closely linked sections Home,Abroad,Return, the essays move through Barolini’s worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There she lived for many years, becoming acquainted with the brightest of Italy’s literary lights. The accomplished poet, novelist, and critic she became now lives at home in two nurturing cultures, America and Italy both. The essays are memoirs of her house on a street named for Henry James’s grandfather, tales of literary journeys from Taos to Taormina, and Paris to Rome, as the young bride of a poet from the Veneto and, later on, as a distinguished writer whose explorations of identity and dislocation took her back to Italian inspirations. From a delightful account of a writing fellowship in an exquisite villa overlooking the Italian lakes to her first trip back to discover distant family roots in the hills of Calabria, Barolini moves lyrically through the generations of her life, giving form to the influences that shaped her art and her sense of self as an American, a woman, and a gifted daughter of the two cultures she has so powerfully imagined. Praise for Helen BaroliniAn impassioned and magnificent contribution to our knowledge of what it has meant and means still to be an ethnic American and woman…
. a book of heroic recovery and affirmation. Alice Walker on The Dream BookLarge in scope, in depth, and in the gift of narrative. Cynthia Ozick on Umbertina

Their Other Side

Our lives are Swiss,Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, So still so cool. But over the Alps, Italy stands the other side. For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom. So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy. Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy’s mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of the great Italian diaspora. Rather, they were drawn to an idea of Italyand its gifts in whose welcome a new self could be created. Or discovered. Emily Dickinson traveled to Italy only in the imaginative genius of her verse. Margaret Fuller struggled alongside her Italian lover in the political revolutions that gave birth to the Italian Republic, while the novelist and short story writer Constance Fennimore Woolson found her home in Venice and Florence. Here, too, is the flamboyant artist Mabel Dodge Luhan, entertaining at her villa near Florence; and Marguerite Chapin of Connecticut, who married an Italian prince and in Rome founded the premier literary review of the mid century, Botteghe Oscure. Finally, here is Iris Cutting Origo, the Anglo American heiress who, with her Italian nobleman husband, built a Tuscan estate, where she wrote acclaimed biographies and created a refuge from Mussolini’s fascism. Linking these lives, Barolini shows, is the transforming catalyst of change in a new land. Their Other Side is a wise, warm, and deeply felt literary journey that brilliantly captures the enduring effects of Italy as a place, a culture, and an experience.

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