Anthony Valerio

ENJOYABLE RADIO SPOT YESTERDAY
CATCH IT ALL HERE:

https:/​/​archive.org/​details/​RiverValleyRhythms08-25-2017

new PAPERBACK EDITION - FIRST PRINTING - CONVERSATION WITH JOHNNY

cover: NEW PAPERBACK EDITION - DANTE IN LOVE

Just Released! IMMIGRANTS - Volumes I & II - Order your copy here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0990467570/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501176392&sr=8-1&keywords=anthony+valerio

today's radio show featuring discussion/​readings from IMMIGRANTS 2 -

https:/​/​archive.org/​details/​RiverValleyRhythms04-06-2017

just published -

IMMIGRANTS according to Anthony Valerio - volume II


get your digital copy here -

https:/​/​www.amazon.com/​dp/​B06XZRPPJY/​ref=clair_cor__2?_encoding=UTF8&cor=US&priceNotAvailable=1

cover/poster IMMIGRANTS - VOLUME II - cover design Dave Barry

Forthcoming in October: The WOMEN'S DOCTOR - IGNAZ PHILLIP SEMMELWEIS

IMMIGRANTS - according to Anthony Valerio - volume I

NEW WORK

IMMIGRANTS - according to Anthony Valerio

Portraits of immigrants, some famous, some not-so-famous. All essential. All important.
from the Author's Note:"...the individual pieces contained herein illustrate how in fact and imagination we all derive from one another, learn from one another, share with one another."

"Valerio's knowledge of Italian experience and his scholarship are quite evident. He really knows both his history and his subject very well. No less important is the fact that he is a first-rate writer who can really tell a good story."
--Bestsellers

https:/​/​www.facebook.com/​Immigrants-165933470569098/​

Radio spot Thursday December 15, 2016-

tunein.com/​radio/​River-Valley-Rhythms-with-Stephan-Allison-p466803/​

Just released - Worldwide Publication of Dante in Love!

Just Released! get your copy here! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N16GMR0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1485814071&sr=8-2&keywords=Anthony+Valerio

Just out--New Digital Edition of--

CONVERSATION WITH JOHNNY

Subsequent artistic attempts at humanizing the don include Analyze This and The Sopranos. Both of these productions feature don characters in therapy. Valerio's use of the therapy device, though, is unique and visionary. It not only predates these films, but also shows the don in control, as therapist, not patient. This configuration emphasizes the power of Italian culture to nurture individual identity. Johnny, the don, serves as cultural nursemaid to the reborn Italian-American, Nicholas.

“The Mafia don as therapist--This comic premise anchors the vignettes that form Conversation with Johnny, allowing Valerio the freedom to demonstrate his virtuosity as poet, comedian, fantasist, philospher, and cultural historian.”
--Professor George Guida, City University of New York

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

get your copy here: https://www.facebook.com/Conversation-with-Johnny-1106320046155360/

review just in by the great poet Rose Romano
I just bought a copy of Conversation with Johnny by Anthony Valerio. I also just finished reading it. That’s not a coincidence. It’s one of those books that you gobble up, snorting and drooling.
Thank goodness there are some writers in this world who aren’t suffering from Lip Flapper’s Syndrome. The book, double-spaced, is less than 240 pages long but it’s got enough stuff for a book that’s a lot longer. There’s little description but it’s very vivid. There’s little in-depth psychological claptrap to justify the characters’ behavior, but these people are as real as you are. Valerio knows what to put in and what to leave out.
He just sits there, types up a good story, and then stops typing—right in the middle of a sentence.
Johnny’s a don and this writer guy talks to him about his problems and stuff. Sometimes I couldn’t tell when the writer was talking to Johnny and when he was talking to me. But that’s okay. The story goes straight from beginning to end but the writing goes around in circles, hops over fences, stops off to buy some fruit, gets hit by a car, gives a talk about Dante. It’s a story that hovers over you long after you close the book.
I’ve added Conversation with Johnny to my pile of books that I read over and over just to keep me company.

Just in- review by Vincent Panella of -
John Dante’s Inferno, A Playboy’s Life by Anthony Valerio

HELL AND BACK

In A Playboy’s Life, Anthony Valerio tells the story of an ordinary man who, almost without effort, finds himself in an extraordinary situation. This lively and skillfully written biography takes as its subject John Aimola, a son of Italian immigrants who renames himself John Dante and begins an intense relationship with Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy brand. The fascinating part of this book is the way Valerio relates John’s life to the great epic poem of his literary idol, Dante Alighieri, whose Inferno is based on the concept that the punishment for sin would resemble the sin itself.

John was born to immigrants who settled in Chicago in the early 1900’s. The family wanted their son to avoid the street gangs and mobsters in the Italian section where they lived and sent him to a boarding school run by Benedictine monks. The monks taught The Divine Comedy, the poem about a pilgrim – Dante himself – who must journey through Hell’s inferno before he can attain Paradise. At the school one monk would read the poem in Italian while another used a pull down screen to flash Gustav Dore’s famous illustrations of sinners in the circles of Hell.

As John grows older he never forgets the monks’ lessons while at the same time he becomes aware after some early sexual encounters that he is attractive to women. John is handsome and good-natured and smart and easy to like. After a brief stint in organized crime, and a short career as a bartender, he opens a night club in a poor area of Chicago and calls it Dante’s Inferno. He decorates the walls with Doré reproductions and places ads in Playboy – a magazine he read and collected. One night a curious Hugh Hefner arrives at the club and John Aimola introduces himself as John Dante. Hefner likes him at once and the meeting begins a decades-long friendship which ends when the two men grow older and the Playboy phenomenon subsides.

Hefner hires John as a bartender and soon promotes him to manager of the Playboy club in Chicago. John is responsible for hiring not only the help but also the Bunnies. Later he would manage other Playboy clubs stateside and in England as the Playboy lifestyle catches on. John is given an apartment in the Playboy mansion and falls under the sway of Hefner and his hyper-sexual world. As a resident of the mansion and part of Hefner’s in-group, John meets and befriends not only the powerful men who pass through, but a train of women willing to provide sex to advance their careers, or simply to join the party. The artists and actors, the gangsters and their women, all touch John’s life, but none more than Hefner himself. The two men will take part in any number of orgies in Hefner’s bedroom. The group sex will include John, Hefner, often one or two male friends, but always more women than men. At a certain point the group sex turns ambiguous, the borders of acceptable male heterosexuality between the two men become porous, and John, who still retains his old world values, withdraws.

This might be a book about sex if not for Valerio’s ability to plumb John’s mind and reawaken him to Dante Alighieri’s system of sin and punishment, something John has put aside until the Playboy life comes to its inevitable end, with age, with the death of his parents, and his own self-questioning. The end is hastened as Hefner himself grows older. Lines have been crossed between the two men. One day, and without telling Hefner, John packs the battered suitcase his mother brought from Italy and drives to Florida, consciously thinking of the dignity he’s lost and what he has to preserve. He settles into a rundown bungalow in Fort Lauderdale and wants to write a book about his life called Guest at the Party. His dream is to retire in Florence with the proceeds and to spend his last years in the city where his counterpart wrote the poem whose world mirrored his own. Valerio writes the biography for him, but John dies before his dream is realized.

As Dante Alighieri peopled Hell with his contemporaries as exemplars of sin, Valerio presents John’s world in the same terms. It is Valerio’s genius to imply that humankind in our time has not changed, and those who live in excess, those who betray the public trust, have places in the underworld if only in our imaginings.

Just out: Creative Bestsellers: Concept to Sales
my supportive writing workshop video: 2+ hours of tips, techniques, anecdotes.
https:/​/​www.udemy.com/​learn-from-the-masters-anthony-valerio-on-writing/​?instructorPreviewMode=guest

A Supporting, Nurturing, Creative Environment-
Some of the Segments:
The Magic of Creative Writing
The Devices Writers Use: Time, Images, Narrative Voice
The Revision Process
Writers’ Block

The Writer’s Life (This is really what it is)

Publishing:
Ins/​Outs & Tips on Self-Publishing: How-to
Through a Literary Agent: Cover Letters

For Teachers of Writing: Two Working Exercises

Anecdotes & Lessons of Writers I've worked with:

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Harold Brodkey
Shel Silverstein

Recent review:Jump start your project!

What a great course! I think it has helped free me from old, unhelpful habits. I feel I have some tools now to bring to a close a project I have been working on for longer than I like to think about. Valerio is easy to listen to and really knows his way in and around the various stages of writing projects, from the creative process to editing. He’s engaging, encouraging, and inviting and the course itself is very easy to follow and the video is excellent. I recommend!


Anthony Valerio is an author, editor and teacher. His books include The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn, Valentino and the Great Italians, Lefty and Her Gangsters, The Little Sailor, BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti, Anita Garibaldi: a Biography, Toni Cade Bambara's One Sicilian Night, John Dante's Inferno, a Playboy's Life, Conversation with Johnny, Dante in Love, IMMIGRANTS according to Anthony Valerio volume I & volume II. His stories have appeared in the Paris Review and his work has been anthologized by The Viking Press and Random House. His most recent work is The Women's Doctor: Ignaz Semmelweis. Mr. Valerio has taught at New York University, The City University of New York and Wesleyan University. He is a member of PEN and The Authors Guild.



"He's just crazy enough-He knows his people-He knows his craft-He gets in, tells his story and gets out-It's what good writing should be."

--Shel Silverstein