Neorealist in Winter (Autumn House Press Fiction Prize)

Neorealist in Winter (Autumn House Press Fiction Prize)

Eleven short stories following Italian characters exploring life in an era of media oversaturation.   Salvatore Pane’s The Neorealist in Winter is a collection of eleven short stories that explore what it means to be human in an age of media oversaturation. Utilizing methods of speculative, historical, and postmodern storytelling, Pane grapples with legacies of immigration, poverty, toxic masculinity, and moral failures, while focusing on working-class issues, family drama, and PTSD. Following eleven Italian narrators, Pane builds a cast of cinematic characters across disparate times and places—a struggling director attends a house party in the la dolce vita of 1960s Rome, gangsters chase a low-level lottery runner in coal valley Scranton, a woman contemplates experimental surgery to purge memories of her childhood trauma in Minnesota, and a pro wrestling promoter descends into self-denial through his autobiography. The Neorealist in Winter was selected by Venita Blackburn as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Fiction Prize.   "Vivid fiction that asks how you can run from your past when it made you who you are."  —Kirkus Review "Eleven stories done in a variety of voices and formal styles feature characters who are stumbling their way through American and Italian cultures, searching for ways to use what little is left of Italian-American identity to give their lives meaning in a confusing 21st century. This collection represents the best of what young writers who still claim their Italian ancestry have to offer."  — Fra Noi "In his new short story collection, The Neorealist in Winter , Salvatore Pane leverages his truth as an Italian-American, as a connoisseur of pop culture, and as a keen observer of the human experience. . . . I implore you—treat yourself to this collection as soon as you can."  — Ovunque Siamo "These stories ache and bend into the convex shapes of despair without necessarily pining for seasons of respite. In the scratch that is ordinary tragedy and extraordinary expectations, a light pulses in these characters filled with language for obsession, adoration, and fury."  —Venita Blackburn, author of How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories "A wildly inventive book that’s both hilarious and heartbreaking, about the strange comforts we find in desperate moments: a man holds off his sorrows by obsessively watching Goodfellas ; a son copes with his absent father via professional wrestling; a woman works through trauma by way of a talking-animal sitcom. Salvatore Pane is a writer alert to all the puzzling paths that healing sometimes takes, a writer of profound insight and honesty and pure gracious human compassion."  —Nathan Hill, author of Wellness: A Novel "Take a breath between these thrilling stories: you’re about to meet characters on the verge of something great or calamitous, navigating a range of worlds from the hyper-real present to the sepia-toned past. Salvatore Pane delivers each cinematic scene with deft narrative urgency and economy, blending fact and fiction in a way that feels thematically true not only to the Italian American experience, but to the harrowing experience of being alive."  —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men "This is a fabulous story collection that taps deeply into the joy and pain, the triumph and tragedy, of anyone who is really alive."  — Chris Lee, Boswell Books Salvatore Pane  was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of two novels,  Last Call in the City of Bridges  and  The Theory of Almost Everything , and a book of nonfiction,  Mega Man 3 . He’s also written video games and graphic novels, and his textbook,  Story Mode: Writing Narrative Video Games for Everyone , was released from Bloomsbury. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and currently serves as an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas. He lives with his wife and Martin Scorsese the Cat in St. Paul, Minnesota.