Anthony Valerio

Toni Cade Bambara's One Sicilian Night
"Valerio gives us home as the heart within the heart, the place that is both vulnerable and free. Moreover, it is the place that is true."
--Afaa Michael Weaver

The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn
"Anthony Valerio's fiction bears likeness to our best dreams when the fantastical elements of the subconscious play themselves out in a vivid replica of reality. Thus, in The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn, we discover that the familiar agenda of our world has on it exotica we have never before witnessed..."
--Baltimore Sun

"Valerio writes with energy and a rich style, and has an unually good ear for detail. The situations happen in Brooklyn in the life of an Italian-American family, and sometimes in Italy. Talk about ethnicity, it's here in dozens of guises and shapes: 'You could tell Valentino coming from a mile away by his gait and the unusual swing of his arms. He placed one foot directly in front of the other and swung his arms high in front and just as high in back...and he never looked at you straight in the face,tilting his head slightly away to hide his cauliflower ear and his scar.' The book has zest, high humor, madness, detached reflection, and pathos."
--The Los Angeles Times

The Little Sailor
"Like most of Valerio's narrative fiction, The Little Sailor alchemically combines personal and popular cultural histories; but unlike the earlier work, this opus resolves the logic and emotion of its protagonist's episodic memory in a linear plot, transmuting the Little Sailor's childhood experience of his community (particularly its women) in the first section, 'Brooklyn, Rome,' into the action of second section,'The Bensonhurst Pigeon,' a whimsical adaptation of Hammett's and Huston's The Maltese Falcon."

BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti
"The book brims over with examples of Bart’s eloquence. It contains, as well, quotations about Giamatti from his colleagues in both academia and baseball, and from people familiar with his life from his earliest days growing up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where Dante and baseball were topics of conversation around the family dinner table. BART contains a wealth of images associated with Giamatti’s life ranging from a photograph of the gas station where Holyoke men and boys gathered to listen to the Red Sox games to a sampling of Italian art works and photography associated with his scholarly pursuits... a deft and balanced selection."

Lefty and Her Gangsters
The incomparable Lefty–a redheaded, left-handed, cross-eyed, married and very sexy woman–reduces her Italian-American lover, Nicholas, to that of a sex slave, her own private Button Man–propelling him back to the neighborhood don, Johnny, for counsel and wisdom. Lefty is also their muse and their salvation, humanizing both the Italian poet and the Italian gangster, and even transforms them to the godfather of the future, the unforgettable Don Pippo–reformed, wise, gentle.