The Swallows of Lunetto

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Witch-hunting in 17th-century Scotland was so well paid that it attracted some blatant fakers – Susan Morrison Joseph Fasano is an American poet, novelist, and songwriter. His books of poetry include The Crossing (Cider Press Review, 2018); Vincent (Cider Press Review, 2015); Inheritance (Cider Press Review, 2014); and Fugue for Other Hands (Cider Press Review, 2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award. His novels include The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020). His first album of original songs, The Wind that Knows the Way, was released in 2022.

I studied in Italy in the 90s, & spent a lot of time in Calabria, & Fasano gets this place, this people, & their spirit absolutely right. SOL is an immersive experience, a wild love story, a trembling account of how politicians find the vulnerable places in our private lives and slip in, remaking us into something we only later see we've become. When the man flees, she follows him. They make a simple life together. They make a baby together. But the man cannot escape his fate. Joseph Fasano Hi, Libby. The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing does not currently have an audio format, unfortunately, but here is a clip of me reading the first chapt …more Hi, Libby. The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing does not currently have an audio format, unfortunately, but here is a clip of me reading the first chapter: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy2AlRt... http://ciderpressreview.com/contributors/joseph-fasano-ba-2011/ Cider Press Review 2011 Book Award AnnouncementJoseph Fasano’s The Swallows Of Lunetto is a novel about a young couple escaping from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War. something like that is perhaps beyond words. It’s a monstrous thing. And such things are only given a shape later. In the story we tell. from the Swallows of Lunetto by Joseph Fasano

I absolutely love this novel...the setting, the characters, the absolutely transporting story. I went to one of Fasano's readings as a school project & didn't intend to buy the book but was blown away by what he read, so I bought a copy. So glad I did. I replied, ‘about 100 times’, and she looked at me like I was crazy. I said ‘well, I was just making sure everything was right’. He had been broken so many times, first by war and then by the wars within him, but he had prevailed. That’s all there is, to prevail.

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What had been missing in those previous manuscripts, I now see, was the voice, the inevitable music and thrust of the narrative. Suddenly—and as often happens in life, inexplicably—that voice announced itself to me, and I began writing. The difference, of course, was that now I was listening; I was letting the story have its way with me. How do we live with our choices, grow through them and beyond them? How do we love those who have committed evil? How do we live with the legacy of our ancestor’s acts? Fasano's poems have appeared in the Yale Review, the Southern Review, FIELD, Tin House, Boston Review, Measure, Passages North, the American Literary Review, and other publications. [7] Leonardo is full of guilt and confusion when the war ends, and the novel asks questions about how people get caught up in the dangerous ideas of political extremes.

Disappointing. Entire plot seems implausible - over the course of a few hours a woman falls for a man accused of a war-time massacre and leaves her village with him. She knows about the accusation but doesn’t ask for details about what actually happened. And what about the reader? What are the details of the massacre? Why did it happen? We’re forced to infer. Ross McCleary is from Edinburgh in Scotland. He says he has stories and poems published widely in print and online. He says he has had a pamphlet published by Spacecraft Press. He says he is one of the organisers of spoken word night Inky Fingers. He says he is the editor of podcast journal Lies, Dreaming. He says he is working on 2 pieces loosely linked to this book. He says he was born 9 months after Jorge Luis Borges passed away. He says a lot of things and not all of them are lies. In 2011, Fasano's first book, Fugue for Other Hands, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. [8] It was nominated for the Kate Tufts Poetry Award and the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award." His second collection of poems, Inheritance, was released in May 2014. In 2015, Fasano published Vincent, a book-length poem based very loosely on the 2008 killing of Tim McLean by Vince Li on a Greyhound Bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on the Trans Canada Highway. [9] His fourth collection of poems, The Crossing, was released in 2018. A novella about an Artist pushing himself to the brink in the name of his art. We’re all dying but his art can save us, or at least that’s what he says…Joseph Fasano is the author of the novels The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the “20 Best Small Press Books of 2020.” His books of poetry include The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year.” Italy, 1945: Alexandra Bianchi lives and works in Lunetto, a provincial village in Italy's Calabria region, which finds itself ravaged by war. Leonardo Gemetti, a young man from Lunetto, has been missing for nearly eight years, and all his village knows of him is that he has carried out an atrocity against the Italian partisans in Mussolini's fallen Republic of Salò. When Alexandra meets a masked figure in the streets of Lunetto, she cannot imagine what she will learn about history and her place in it. Besides that, the emphasis on dreams is too much, and the dialogue is not realistic, with many a conversation that (either flew over my head or) was just pointless (not a literal quote:) ‘how do you know?’ ‘Know what? I don’t’ ‘you don’t’ ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to know. You’re supposed to be in it.’ ‘That’s where we are?’ ‘That’s where we are.’