ISBN 978-0-9784321-5-7
$20.00
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Lilla, Joey and Clara Pentangeli, their father Salvatore and their mercurial mother Seraphina live on Paradise Street behind a giant billboard, in a charmed world filled with operatic heroines. Seraphina idolizes Maria Callas. Between bouts of housework, she re-enacts Violetta’s death scene from La Traviata, dresses in a kimono like CioCioSan in Madama Butterfly, and concocts outrageous tales for her three enchanted children. She also reveals one or two secrets from her past. At last real-life tragedy overtakes the house on Paradise.

Michelle Alfano is a Toronto writer and a Co-Editor with the literary quarterly Descant. Her short story “Opera,” on which Made Up Of Arias is based, was a finalist for the Journey Prize. Her fiction and non-fiction work has been published in Canada and in the United States. She will be featured in a forthcoming documentary on the passengers, and the children of the passengers, of the Saturnia, an immigrant ship which transported thousands of Italian-born immigrants to Canada in the 1950s and 60s and which will be featured on OMNI-TV. She blogs at alitchick.blogspot.com

“Made Up of Arias is all the voices of childhood, all the stories that allow a child’s imagination to safely try on adult themes. Alfano is a keen observer, with an eye for detail and a gift for humour.” —Julie Booker, author Silver Hearts

“Michelle Alfano speaks in the beautifully compelling, yet remarkably guileless voice of her protagonist and narrator, Lilla Pentangeli…Michelle Alfano’s mastery of English and Italian, her knowledge of opera, and her ability to elevate the ordinary, are inspiring and transforming.” —Lina Medaglia, author The Demons of Aquilonia

“Michelle Alfano’s Made Up of Arias beautifully evokes an immigrant childhood lived against the backdrop of opera, which stands in for all that her characters have lost or will never attain even while it speaks to the most common and everyday of their tragedies and joys. Alfano writes with the humour and compassion of someone who not only understands her characters, but forgives them.” —Nino Ricci, author The Origin of Species and Lives of the Saints

“Made up of Arias is an important and welcome addition to the tradition of Italian-Canadian literary voices … an outstanding writer whose fiction carves a distinct place in Canada’s national narrative. Beautifully observed, richly comic, heartbreaking and compelling, Made up of Arias, deserves to be read by a broad audience as well as specialists. —Lilia Topouzova, screenwriter The Mosquito Problem

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Amber Albrecht.

A cycle of spare, sweet-sad, magical tales. A small girl dreams a house floating away. Lolly loves pink. Walter and Hank conduct a juke-box war. Tessie dances with a spectral Sidney Greenstreet. Sadie may or may not have caused Lila to be air-borne. Characters migrate between stories. Down-to-earth realism turns out to be not quite real after all. Limited and damaged lives are refracted and transformed, as in a kaleidoscope, by absurdity, by wonder, by magic and desire. As a character in one of these stories reflects, thinking of the last word in Joyce’s Ulysses, the answer to the mystery of life is YES.

Sylvia Markle-Craine lives in Guelph, Ontario. She has published poetry and short stories. One of her stories won first prize in the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival Literary Contest.

“With some basic ingredients she cooks up just enough magic to make perfect little fables from what on some level amounts to an album of small town gossip. By inviting readers behind closed doors, she reveals worlds rich in character, the quirky opinions and pursuits of those characters, and the diner-friendly language they use to communicate with one another….at the intersection of strangeness and character Markle-Craine writes her most descriptive, sensual sentences to help us tune into the smaller details of daily existence.” —”Off the Shelf”

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by Amber Albrecht.

ISBN 978-0-9784321-2-6
$28
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This Byronic tale is a narrative tour de force reminiscent of the haunting, romantic visions of Julien Gracq. At once mystery, thriller, erotic fantasy, ghost story, epic, a tale of obsession and weird encounter, Scarbo Edge is set on a Lake Huron coast unlike anything encountered before in Canadian literature. Readers will not soon forget the doomed lovers Isa and Eber—whose trials invoke the legend of Tristan and Iseult—the noble Beppo, the terrifying bear-hunter Ledoux.

Virgil Burnett is an author, publisher and artist working in several different media. His work has been widely published in Europe and North America. A show of his illustrations was exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in 2005. He lives in Southern Ontario.

Book design by Christian Snyder. Cover art by the author.