The Neorealist in Winter: Stories
Staff Reviews
I recommend a cookbook if it has at least one recipe you'll want to make repeatedly, and a collection if it has at least one story that will live in your head forever. That's not a low bar; most books don't clear it. In this book, for this reader, it was "Her Final Nights," one of two speculative pieces. Pane offers a variety of historical and present-day settings as well, unified by themes that include film and television, Italian(-American) culture, and unresolved trauma. His endings deliver emotional left-hooks I wasn't prepared for, such as one story that starts with a middle-aged divorcee learning to skateboard and ends with a delicious lurch into horror. The funniest piece is formatted as an oral history of a forgotten sitcom, an ode to all the weird corners of our cultural history. All in all, an impressive medley with more than a few gems.
Description
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.
Praise for The Neorealist in Winter: Stories
"Eleven stories that cast different facets of Italian American identity in a neo-noir light. . . . A cinematic thread weaves through them, and it can feel as though scenes are written with the camera in mind, what with dramatic last-minute trains to Siena, British hand models riding in shiny cars, and deals made while picking at shrimp cocktails. . . . It’s in these stories that Pane’s sense of play is most evident, and they buoy the collection. Vivid fiction that asks how you can run from your past when it made you who you are."
— Kirkus
“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 Black Jesus and Other Superheroes
“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. 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. Pane builds 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
