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A celebration of family, food, and art By Laura Anne Bird If you’re itching to run off to Italy and not come back, Angela Paolantonio is your girl. If you love cured meats and pasta, even better. Paolantonio was born in Brooklyn to Italian American parents. While growing up, she didn’t know much about her Italian grandparents, but as an art and history student in high school and college, she developed a reverence for the past which led her to wonder about her extended family. “I held this curious flame inside me. Who were my grandparents, and where did they [...]

The Emigrant/Immigrant Experience: On hardships, bravery, and chutzpah By Laura Anne Bird “I've been thinking about some version of this novel since I was a little girl,” Juliet Grames says about her riveting debut, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. “When I was five, my grandmother had a traumatic brain injury that made me obsessed with the idea of capturing and preserving her life story. What I knew about her upbringing in impoverished southern Italy in the 1920s as well as her emigration to the U.S. fascinated me.” Grames spent years collecting stories from her extended family in [...]

Christina Clancy The Sandwich Generation and Families of Choice By Laura Anne Bird In Christina Clancy’s debut novel, The Second Home, a charming little beach house in Cape Cod assumes an enormous role: it serves as a magnet—both geographical and emotional—that tugs relentlessly on the three adult Gordon children. "Houses are containers of memories,” says Clancy. “The spaces and the objects inside of them have lives.” Indeed, the Gordons’ Wellfleet, Massachusetts home has been in the family for generations, which means that every creaky floorboard, scruffy chair, and mote of dust has the power to stir up nostalgia [...]