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The End

Paperback $25.00

Published on Oct 06, 2009 | 336 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

$25.00

Published on Oct 06, 2009 | 336 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

An incredible debut and National Book Award-nominated novel, described as “Memento meets Augie March. Didion meets Hitchcock” by Esquire, from the author of The Volunteer

It is August 15, 1953, the day of a boisterous and unwieldy street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in northern Ohio. As the festivities reach a riotous pitch and billow into the streets, five members of the community labor under the weight of a terrible secret. As these floundering souls collide, one day of calamity and consequence sheds light on a half century of their struggles, their follies, and their pride. And slowly, it becomes clear that buried deep in the hearts of these five exquisitely drawn characters is the long-silenced truth about the crime that twisted each of their worlds.

Cast against the racial, spiritual, and moral tension that has given rise to modern America, this first novel exhumes the secrets lurking in the darkened crevices of the soul of our country. Inventive, explosive, and revelatory, The End introduces Salvatore Scibona as an important new voice in American fiction.

“A masterful novel set amid racial upheaval in 1950s America during the flight of second-generation immigrants from their once-necessary ghettos. Full of wisdom, consequence, and grace, Salvatore Scibona’s radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which The End is only the beginning.” – Annie Dillard

“Lyrical… Bold… Beautiful.” – The Boston Globe

“Exquisitely rendered… Does not open up so much as catch and slowly reel in.” – Los Angeles Times

“Rhapsodic… Unflinching… Masterful… A novel unafraid to split into the breastplate of humankind and aim a floodlight at the demons dancing there.” – Southern Review

“Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty.” – Esquire

“Precise yet inventive…[Scibona] fleshes out a scrabbling immigrant Cleveland.” – The American Book Review

“Like no other contemporary writer…A concordance of the immigrant experience from the beautiful to the brutal and everything in between.” – ZZ Packer, author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“Possibly the only novel I’ve ever read that legitimately deserves to be called Bellovian. And that’s no small claim.” – Kenyon Review

“Breathtaking… Think not only Faulkner, but also T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.” – Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Scibona loves language and recognizes the power of using the right word. He seems better educated than most American writers, with a strong vocabulary and rich ideas that urge him to build complex sentences…. To the reader’s enrichment, The End is an outstanding work in all the right ways” – Annie Proulx, The Guardian

“Virtuosic… There is an intensity of purpose to Salvatore Scibona’s endeavor that is decidedly uncommon… Scibona is a deft and intricate plotter… There is no doubt whatsoever of the beauty or brilliance of Scibona’s writing… The free flow of thought is almost miraculously caught.” – Olivia Laing, The Observer

“Scibona is a gutsy, heart-and-soul writer, unafraid of emotion and ready to take risks.” – Rosemary Goring, Herald (UK)

“It may have taken a while for Scibona to get to this side of the Atlantic, but The End suggests this is the beginning of a fascinating career from an important new American voice.” – Stuart Evers, Daily Telegraph (UK)

“This is an extraordinary novel about the experience of immigration; unsentimental and beautifully written.” — Kate Saunders, The Times (UK)

“Its moments of sharply realized emotional pull and gentle beauty reel you in.” — Metro (UK)

Author

Salvatore Scibona

Salvatore Scibona’s first book, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing. He was awarded a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award. In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was included in the New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” list of writers to watch. The End is published or forthcoming in seven languages. Scibona’s short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award. His work has appeared in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, The Threepenny Review, A Public Space, Divisione di la Repubblica, Satisfiction, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. A graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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The End

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