Blue Italian

Skillfully capturing the daily quirks of life in a boisterous, working-class ethnic family--daily assaulted by family clamor, endless courses of food, embarrassment and fierce love--Blue Italian traces the pitfalls of the young life and three-year marriage of a wise-cracking and heart-winning heroine, Rosa Salvatore. With an ear for acid dialogue and an eye for everyday ironies, Ciresi unfolds Rosa Salvatore's tale: growing up on fantasies, guilt, and fagioli in the New Haven working-class Italian neighborhood of Pizza Beach; working her way through a local college by slinging hash, while agonizing over her thighs and aching for passion; landing a job and meeting Gary Fisher, a nice Jewish lawyer from Flushing with a great butt and angst of his own. Rosa and Gary fall in love, make love, get married, fight, make up, fight again--until Gary is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and Rosa realizes the power of her love--and the crushing force of regret.



Frank and warm, crackling with razor-sharp wit, Blue Italian is a love story about an ill-fated couple who almost missed realizing how much they loved each other. It establishes Rita Ciresi as a writer with a unique gift for language, character, and emotion--a novelist to read, and a novelist to watch.

Rita Ciresi is the author of the comic novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Pink Slip, Blue Italian, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You and the short-story collections Mother Rocket and Sometimes I Dream in Italian. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been widely published in literary magazines and translated into half a dozen languages.  She is professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa.