Background
Barolini, Helen was born on November 18, 1925 in Syracuse, New York, United States.
(Fiction. "MORE ITALIAN HOURS is an elegant, intelligent a...)
Fiction. "MORE ITALIAN HOURS is an elegant, intelligent and, finally, luminous book" - Carole Maso. These stories captured my attention from the beginning to the end. Barolini's telling details create the characters so vividly that I felt I could almost touch them...Italy too is alive in these stories as the characters inhabiting it" - Nahid Rachlin, author of Foreigner. "Helen Barolini emerges...as both a serious literary artist and a spokesperson with a feisty feminist conscience for Italian American social and literary issues" - Rita Signorelli-Pappas, Women's Review of Books.
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(Our lives are Swiss,Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, So sti...)
Our lives are Swiss,Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, So still-so cool.But over the Alps, Italy stands the other side.For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom. So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy.Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy's mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of the great Italian diaspora. Rather, they were drawn to an idea of Italyand its gifts-in whose welcome a new self could be created. Or discovered.Emily Dickinson traveled to Italy only in the imaginative genius of her verse. Margaret Fuller struggled alongside her Italian lover in the political revolutions that gave birth to the Italian Republic, while the novelist and short-story writer Constance Fennimore Woolson found her home in Venice and Florence. Here, too, is the flamboyant artist Mabel Dodge Luhan, entertaining at her villa near Florence; and Marguerite Chapin of Connecticut, who married an Italian prince and in Rome founded the premier literary review of the mid-century, Botteghe Oscure. Finally, here is Iris Cutting Origo, the Anglo-American heiress who, with her Italian nobleman husband, built a Tuscan estate, where she wrote acclaimed biographies-and created a refuge from Mussolini's fascism.Linking these lives, Barolini shows, is the transforming catalyst of change in a new land. Their Other Side is a wise, warm, and deeply felt literary journey that brilliantly captures the enduring effects of Italy as a place, a culture, and an experience.
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(Fiction. "In this seminal work, Helen Barolini tells the ...)
Fiction. "In this seminal work, Helen Barolini tells the story of Frances Molletone grappling with her ethnic heritage as she falls in love with a married man. The author takes us to post-WW2 Italy, a little-documented era of turmoil, and we discover the culture of the Italian diaspora, as well as Italy before it was 'discovered.' When it first appeared, this novel was highly acclaimed in Italy. Now, it once again speaks to us of romantic love and conflicted longing in the aftermath of war"—Christine Lehner.
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("Aldus and His Dream Book" is a tribute to the life and w...)
"Aldus and His Dream Book" is a tribute to the life and work of the pioneering scholar-publisher, Aldus Manutius (1449/50-1515). Helen Barolini's text discusses Aldus, his education, his publishing vision, his typographic innovations, and his famous Venetian press. At the same time, this book reproduces all the illustrations, and many of the full pages, from the Aldine press edition of Francesco C...
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(Nonfiction. "I much admire this lively, lucid, and often ...)
Nonfiction. "I much admire this lively, lucid, and often extremely moving collection of essays. As part memoir, part social commentary, and part literary criticism, Helen Barolini's wonderful CHIAROSCURO seems to me not only profoundly original but also of crucial importance in helping establish both the existence and the contours of a set of Italian American traditions whose nature and significance are becoming increasingly clear. Whether remembering the repressions that shaped her complex cultural heritage (as in the poignant 'How I learned to speak Italian') or meditating on the continuing near-invisibility of that heritage (as in the feisty 'Writing to a Brick Wall'), Barolini offers key definitions as well as luminous descriptions of what it means to be an Italian American in every section of this book"--Sandra M. Gilbert, University of California, Davis.
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( One of the first novels to explore Italian American wom...)
One of the first novels to explore Italian American women's experience and an acknowledged contemporary classic of Italian American literature, Umbertina tells the richly detailed story of four generations of women. The novel follows Umbertina and her descendants from her roots in a Calabrian village through a period of American assimilation, to Umbertina's great-granddaughters' efforts to resolve the dilemma of their Italian American identity. When first published in 1979, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it "an important novel for these times. . . . Through a dazzling interplay of American and Italian characters in both countries, Helen Barolini delineates the major concerns of all thinking American ethnics." This is no less true today, as this republication restores Umbertina to a reading public newly attuned to the complexities of cultural inheritance and identity. "An ambitious saga which spans the history and probes some of the tensions of the Italian American . . . . panoramic, descriptive, and solidly crafted."—Publisher's Weekly For course use in: ethnic literature, ethnic studies, gender studies, Italian American literature, literature of immigration, 20th-century U.S. literature Helen Barolini's other works include the novel Love in the Middle Ages and Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity. She conceived and edited the volume The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American Women, winner of an American Book Award and a Susan Koppelman Award of the American Culture Association.
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( Born of Italian-American parents, Helen Barolini redisc...)
Born of Italian-American parents, Helen Barolini rediscovered her culinary heritage when she married Italian writer Antonio Barolini and lived for some years in Italy. Festa is a year-long feast of memories and delicious, traditional Italian dishes—from St. Nicholas sweetmeats in December and perciatelli with sardines and fennel for March’s St. Joseph’s Day, to figs with prosciutto for summer’s Ferragosto and pumpkin gnocchi for an American Thanksgiving in Italy.
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(A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one boo...)
A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America's most distinctive voices. These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer's life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini's art. Divided into three closely linked sections-Home,Abroad,Return,-the essays move through Barolini's worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There she lived for many years, becoming acquainted with the brightest of Italy's literary lights. The accomplished poet, novelist, and critic she became now lives at home in two nurturing cultures, America and Italy both.The essays are memoirs of her house on a street named for Henry James's grandfather, tales of literary journeys from Taos to Taormina, and Paris to Rome, as the young bride of a poet from the Veneto and, later on, as a distinguished writer whose explorations of identity and dislocation took her back to Italian inspirations.From a delightful account of a writing fellowship in an exquisite villa overlooking the Italian lakes to her first trip back to discover distant family roots in the hills of Calabria, Barolini moves lyrically through the generations of her life, giving form to the influences that shaped her art and her sense of self-as an American, a woman, and a gifted daughter of the two cultures she has so powerfully imagined.Praise for Helen BaroliniAn impassioned and magnificent contribution to our knowledge of what it has meant and means still to be an ethnic American and woman . . . . a book of heroic recovery and affirmation.-Alice Walker (on The Dream Book)Large in scope, in depth, and in the gift of narrative.-Cynthia Ozick (on Umbertina)
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(Aldus and His Dream Book is a tribute to the life and wor...)
Aldus and His Dream Book is a tribute to the life and work of the pioneering scholar-publisher, ALdus Manutius. This text discusses his education, publishing vision, typographic innovations, and his famous Venetian press. This edition is certain to appeal to the historian, bibliophile, art historian, designer, and student of the many rich and emblemtic illustrations.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001L6E2D8/?tag=2022091-20
Barolini, Helen was born on November 18, 1925 in Syracuse, New York, United States.
AB magna cum laude, Syracuse University, 1947; Master of Library Science, Columbia University, 1959.
Lecturer Pace University, Pleasantville, New York, since 1990. Lecturer, Padua, Italy, Westchester Community College, Valhalla, New York, 1988. Writer-in-residence Quarry Farm, Elmira College, 1989.
Resident scholar Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study Center, Lake Como, Italy, 1991. Visiting artist American Academy Rome, 2001, Teaching Seminar, Middlebury College, 2010.
( One of the first novels to explore Italian American wom...)
( Born of Italian-American parents, Helen Barolini redisc...)
(A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one boo...)
("Aldus and His Dream Book" is a tribute to the life and w...)
(This collection of elegant, quietly powerful poems evokes...)
(Aldus and His Dream Book is a tribute to the life and wor...)
(A tribute to the life and work of the pioneering scholar-...)
(Our lives are Swiss,Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, So sti...)
( “A lively, lucid, and often extremely moving collection...)
(Nonfiction. "I much admire this lively, lucid, and often ...)
(Fiction. "MORE ITALIAN HOURS is an elegant, intelligent a...)
(Fiction. "In this seminal work, Helen Barolini tells the ...)
(n)
Member of Hudson Valley River Writers Association, Authors Guild, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association American Center, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Antonio Barolini, November 8, 1950 (deceased). Children: Teodolinda, Susanna, Nicoletta.