Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Girl loses her mind. Manic Depressive Dream Girl is a story of love as a drug you can't quit, of the manic pixie dream girl as more than she appears, and of hope and holding on. 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. 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. 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.

Tony D’Angelo’s brother Nate is dead. His family is devastated, his life is thrown into upheaval, and he doesn’t want to deal with any of it. Not with his brother’s death, not with his guilt-ridden father, and not with the consequences of his erratic behavior involving his ex-girlfriend. But when he meets Mikey, a hallucination of his nine-year-old self dressed as a Ninja Turtle, Tony is forced to face all the things he’d rather not. Luis Neer’s second chapbook is a study in catharsis itself. The title poem is ‘Become Death’; a sermon of paranoia, burder, an revelation; a cry against the atomic bomb; an impassioned homage to Neer’s literary hero, Allen Gingsberg.This research, for me, was and is deeply enjoyable. I wanted to know more, then more, then more. How did Mussolini’s fascists attempt to “educate” the youth in the years prior to the Second World War? With what kind of wood might a young Calabrese artist make her own charcoal with which to draw her images? What would she see in the waves outside her window? At exactly what depth do fishing crews net their catch in a particular season, off a particular port, in the Tyrrhenian Sea?

I studied in Italy in the 90s, & spent a lot of time in Calabria, & Fasano gets this place, this people, & their spirit absolutely right. SOL is an immersive experience, a wild love story, a trembling account of how politicians find the vulnerable places in our private lives and slip in, remaking us into something we only later see we've become. Every city has a story. Behind the veil of tourism, New Orleans drips with hunger, sorcery, and secrets. One of those is Honey Island Swamp, a powerful nexus of magic outside the city limits. Its blue-green water can make you ageless and manifest carnivals out of thin air. Similar to the River Styx, it serves as the gateway between the realms of the living, dead, and in-between. And because of this power, it becomes both a haven and a battlefield for witches, humans, and other magical beings.Disappointing. Entire plot seems implausible - over the course of a few hours a woman falls for a man accused of a war-time massacre and leaves her village with him. She knows about the accusation but doesn’t ask for details about what actually happened. And what about the reader? What are the details of the massacre? Why did it happen? We’re forced to infer. 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 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." 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. 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

So much of the brutal, beautiful magic of Christina Rosso's Creole Conjure is in its intricate details and how deftly they weave themselves together into a seductively monstrous, fairytale tapestry. Each one of these stories is inextricably intertwined with its sister stories-each a single coiled snake on the head of the well-groomed Gorgon. Strands of the old-world fairy tales we know are braided with the new-world characters and landscapes. In Rosso's darkly dreamy New Orleans and lush swamplands, women and girls find themselves both freed and dammned by their own bestial appetites. You can't be certain from one moment to the next who will be devouring whom." – Lindsay Lusby, author of Catechesis: a postpastoral Joseph Parker Okay lives in Tucson with his best friend/cat. He’s the author of “my phone is about to die and i hope it takes me with it” (2F2H, 2016). He tweets @verysoftlake The Italian text that the author inserts is *far* too much for an English language novel. Rarely is there an intuitive link to the text for someone who doesn’t know Italian. It’s only by coincidence that I have a bunch of Duolingo under my belt, but if I hadn’t, then something as simple as ‘Gli uomini’ doesn’t add depth to the book, it distracts from it. 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]I quit writing 20 years ago, and this book made me want to write again, made me believe in what words can do. 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. Fasano's second novel is an absolute masterpiece of history, psychology, and storytelling. Yes, it's set in Calabria in 1945-46, but its truths clearly resonate with the contemporary US and elsewhere. I hope this book reaches you, whoever you are, because it has things to tell us about how we get caught up in dangerous ideas--and how we overcome them--and it does so beautifully. Author Joseph Fasano recounts sitting next to someone reading his book on a flight". 23 February 2023. 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.

Besides that, the emphasis on dreams is too much, and the dialogue is not realistic, with many a conversation that (either flew over my head or) was just pointless (not a literal quote:) ‘how do you know?’ ‘Know what? I don’t’ ‘you don’t’ ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to know. You’re supposed to be in it.’ ‘That’s where we are?’ ‘That’s where we are.’ 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. There is no more authoritative collection of the poetry that T.S. Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965. 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 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.” So I set out to make something else. And I did. There were months of research, plotting, scribbling, pulling the car to the side of the road on the way to the grocery to jot down a sentence, a line, an idea. And yet, once again, something was missing. I had a completed manuscript of what might otherwise have been a third novel, but I knew, in the end, I had nothing.Blake Wallin is a writer from Atlanta specializing in poetry, fiction, and playwriting. A recent graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program in poetry, he attended the 2018 Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive as well as the 2018 Virginia Quarterly Review’s Summer Workshop in Poetry. He is the author of two previous books, No Sign on the Island (Bottlecap Productions) and Occipital Love (Ghost City Press). She now plans to attend one of his book readings in Scotland, which is his reason for travelling here – a promotional book tour.