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It is August 15, 1953, the day of a boisterous and unwieldy street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in northern Ohio. As the festivities reach a riotous pitch and billow into the streets, five members of the community labor under the weight of a terrible secret. As these floundering souls collide, one day of calamity and consequence sheds light on a half century of their struggles, their follies, and their pride. And slowly, it becomes clear that buried deep in the hearts of these five exquisitely drawn characters is the long-silenced truth about the crime that twisted each of their worlds.
Cast against the racial, spiritual, and moral tension that has given rise to modern America, this first novel exhumes the secrets lurking in the darkened crevices of the soul of our country. Inventive, explosive, and revelatory, The End introduces Salvatore Scibona as an important new voice in American fiction.
"Starred Review. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona's portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force." - Publishers Weekly
"Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bittersweet, and devastating..." - Booklist
"A well-crafted, unabashedly literary debut. ...A demanding but rewarding novel likely to appeal to a very small audience." - Kirkus Reviews
"Exquisitely rendered...Does not open up so much as catch and slowly reel in." - Los Angeles Times
This information about The End was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Salvatore Scibona (born 2 June 1975) is an award-winning American novelist and short-story writer. His first book, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Whiting Writers' Award. He also bagged the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing for the same.
His work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best New American Voices, and the New York Times. In June 2010 he was named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers worth watching.
A graduate of St. John's College in Santa Fe and of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Link to Salvatore Scibona's Website
Name Pronunciation
Salvatore Scibona: SAL-vator-re ski-bone-a
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