About Sketches Of The Common Saints:
Sketches Of The Common Saints is a vivid portrayal of a Southern Italian family and the audacious but genuine world they inhabit. From the ominous beauty of Reggio Calabria, through the baroque cityscapes of Torino, to the promise and sometimes harsh reality of Toronto’s working-class streets, these interrelated sketches are reflections of common folk and their journey towards a kind of sainthood in the culmination of a dream.
Told from various perspectives, in clear and fast-paced prose that often dances with the poetic, each story is conveyed through an unfiltered lens of blunt realism imbued with imagery that evokes the common beauty of a working-class culture navigating the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a willing and necessary diaspora. Where the suffocating beauty of the Catholic Church intermingles with the dark doorways of iniquity, and the beatitude of matriarchy crashes into the broken back of patriarchy, these common people face the emptiness of life and the fullness of life and the absurdity of life with a jaundiced eye and an unbridled passion, offering no apologies and putting on no airs. Taken on their own, or as a part of the larger narrative, the stories befit a boisterous Sunday table filled with heaping plates of pasta, carafes of homemade wine, and generous portions of attitude and emotion.
At moments poignant and poetic, at others savage and funny; wistful, nostalgic, ravenous for the fullness of life, each sketch adds a layer to the infinite fresco painted in the imagination of every pilgrim whoever left the past behind for a chance at a new life.
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Author Bio:
The author has been writing for many years. Even as life has been happening and he’s been busy making other plans, he has always been writing. Now he has finally decided, not only to write, but to be a Writer.
He is a proponent of great literature and recommends reading Hemingway, Celine, Kerouac, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, and as many works of the Western canon as a life of reading will allow. He believes, with unwavering conviction, that just like great music and great art, great literature is great for a reason and it should be read with voracious audacity; detractors, deconstructionists, and decolonizers be damned.
He currently lives outside of Toronto with his family and he writes.