The University of Wisconsin Press

---

Fiction

---

 

Catina's Haircut A Novel in Stories Paola Corso "Corso follows an Italian family through four generations from the Calabrian town of San Procopio to Pittsburgh in this fable-like follow-up to Giovanna’s 86 Circles. . . . The stories, individually, find moments of inspired, ethereal revelation." —Publishers Weekly •On Library Journal's First Novels Notable List •A Sons of Italy National Book Club Selection •Recommended Genealogy Reading List, Family Tree Magazine •Best Books for General Audiences, Public Library Association Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories spans four generations of a peasant family in the brutal poverty of post-Unification southern Italy and in an immigrant’s United States. The women in these tales dare to cross boundaries by discovering magical leaps inherent in the landscape, in themselves, and in the stories they tell and retell of family tragedy at a time of political unrest. Through an oral tradition embedded in the stone of memory and the flow of its reinvention, their passionate tale of resistance and transformation courses forward into new generations in a new world. A woman threatens to join the land reform struggle in her Calabrian hill town, against her husband’s will, during a call for revolution in 1919. A brother and sister turn to the village sorceress in Fascist Italy to bring rain to their father’s drought-stricken farm. In Pittsburgh, new immigrants witness a miraculous rescue during the Great Flood of 1936. A young girl courageously dives into the Allegheny River to save her grandfather’s only memento of the old country. With only broken English to guide her, a widow hops a bus in search of live chickens to cook for Easter dinner in her husband’s memory. An aging woman in the title story is on a quest to cut the ankle-length hair that is as hard as the rocky soil of Calabria in a drought. A lonely woman who survived World War II bombings in her close-knit village struggles to find community as a recent immigrant. A daughter visits her mother’s hill town to try and fulfill a wish for her to see the Fata Morgana. These haunting images permeate Corso’s linked stories of loss, hope, struggle, and freedom. “Catina’s Haircut taps into deep places of storytelling —collective memory and imagination, folklore and social history—to bring together in one book the Fata Morgana, live chickens, the Risorgimento, and the Pittsburgh Steelers.” —Adria Bernardi, author of Openwork Paola Corso grew up in the Pittsburgh area. She is a Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award winner, a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist, and author of a book of poems, Death by Renaissance, and a collection of stories, Giovanna’s 86 Circles. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)

October 2010 LC: 2010011534 PS 112 pp.   6 x 9 Cloth $21.95 t ISBN 978-0-299-24840-6 ADD TO CART   Visit paolacorso.com "From the hard, unforgiving soil of Calabria to the congested neighborhood of Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield section, the stories in Catina’s Haircut eloquently present the narrative of the Italian immigrant in America. Corso’s eye is sharp, fiercely honest yet also able to linger over unexpected beauty when it appears in this demanding landscape.” —Hilary Masters, Carnegie Mellon University

Home | Books | Journals | Events | Textbooks | Authors | Related | Search | Order | Contact

If you have trouble accessing any page in this web site, contact our Web manager. E-mail: webmaster@uwpress.wisc.edu Updated November 23, 2011 © 2011, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System