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The first novel novel from Emmy, Peabody, and Humanitas Award winner and Executive Producer of The Wonder Years, Bob Brush. The Piazza is a heartwarming, heartbreaking, always funny, sometimes tragic, fantastical love song to a time and place that no longer exist - if in fact they ever existed at all.
The Piazza is a delight. These tales evoke the magic of Calvino’s most beguiling works and the conscience-searing observations of Joyce’s Dubliners. There’s humor and wisdom in these stories, and beauty too, and - delivered so deftly you don’t see it coming - the hard punch of history.
- Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the John Gardner Fiction Award
On a tiny piazza in an obscure Italian hilltop town, circa 1933, remarkable things are happening. From the window of his mother’s bakery a young boy, Niccolo, sees it all: a pickpocket who purloins human emotions; a beggar who summons the voice of God from the town well; two young lovers whose passion changes history; a blind silent-movie accompanist. An exotic princess held captive in the local nunnery, a blackshirt bent on revenge and, hovering over all, the looming shadow of fascism and Benito Mussolini. In The Piazza: Stories from Piazza Santa Caterina Piccola, citizens of this unexpected and improbable place find themselves bound together by their hopes, their lies, their humanity and their destiny, unbowed in the face of onrushing war and certain catastrophe. It’s a heartwarming, heartbreaking, always funny, sometimes tragic, fantastical love song to a time and place that no longer exist - if in fact they ever existed at all.
The stories mix together like the colors in an artist’s palette: funny and subversive, ironic and touching. It’s an Italian romance, sparkling with light and color, filled with unexpected characters and improbable victories - as, all the while, tragedy and sorrow lurk in the sunlit shadows. It’s radiant with enchantment. I loved it.
- Michael Dinner, Emmy Award winning director and producer of Justified and The Wonder Years
