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Saraceno
Saraceno
Saraceno
Ebook133 pages3 hours

Saraceno

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Billy Salviati just wants to be a good soldier, to follow orders and live under the radar. It's all going well until he meets Hettie Warshaw one night on a dark street in Hell's Kitchen. Then his life unravels. Saraceno is the story of a hit man whose good looks are equalled only by his gift for friendship. He survives the vicissitudes of good looks, but his gift for friendship puts him in the crosshairs of friends and enemies.

Not many writers about the Mafia listened to the notorious Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, and Joey Adonis drinking marsala and chatting in a kitchen, but Djelloul Marbrook did and celebrates it with a poet’s ear in this haunting tale of redemption.

Saraceno is an electric tone poem straight from a world we only think we know. An heir to George V. Higgins, Marbrook writes dialogue that not only entertains with an intoxicating clickety-clack, but also packs a truth about low-life mob culture The Sopranos only hints at.
—Dan Baum, author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip, Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death & Life in New Orleans, and Smoke & Mirrors: The War on Drugs & the Politics of Failure.

... a good ear for crackling dialogue ... I love Marbrook's crude, raw music of the streets. The notes are authentic and on target ...
—Sam Coale, The Providence (RI) Journal

Strongly recommended as a remarkably crafted tale.
—Midwest Book Review

This lyrical and violent, funny and sad, hot and cool novella haunts us. Try it.
—Ann LaFarge, Taconic Weekend

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 8, 2010
ISBN9780971890862
Saraceno
Author

Brent Robison

I live in the Catskill Mountains of New York. My writing has appeared in a dozen print and online literary journals, as well as hundreds of corporate training and marketing publications. My stories have won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. I am also the publisher and editor of the Hudson Valley regional literary annual, Prima Materia.THE PRINCIPLE OF ULTIMATE INDIVISIBILITY, A Web of Stories, is available in trade paperback edition from booksellers everywhere. It is enhanced by more than a dozen cool abstract drawings by Wendy Drolma.REVIEWSSee this recent review: https://dactylreview.com/2019/06/25/the-principle-of-ultimate-indivisibility-a-web-of-stories-by-brent-robison/Other links are on my blog at http://ultimate-indivisibility.comMoonbeam Award winning author Ned White says: "Brent Robison's superbly crafted collection of short stories doesn't shy away from its central thesis - that we are all crosswired with each other in ways both obvious and finely nuanced.... Buddhists, Jungians, and even quantum theorists would have a field day with the output of Robison's imagination."In the October Chronogram Magazine, Anne Pyburn manages to capture the essence of my book in three paragraphs that are so eloquent I'm hard-pressed to choose the best blurb... how about "a feast of food for thought, a richly imagined reality that looks much like our own world if we could really see it."Online at POD People, Cheryl Anne Gardner gives a really thoughtful, in-depth examination of the themes (and their alternates) that she sees at work in the stories and the book as a whole. I'm immensely grateful for this kind of close reading and generous analysis, made even better by the fact that hers is all volunteer labor. Again, so difficult to choose a few words from so many insightful comments; here's one: "...the collection really begged the question: Hope? Is it really genuine or is it something we invent as a way to justify our acceptance..."At the website Self-Publishing Review, whose mission is to help bring self-published literature to a more respected position in the minds of readers and the industry, editor Henry Baum closes his review with this: "Overall, it’s a collection of very strong writing - thoughtful, full of vivid imagery, sorrowful at times, but never self-pitying. The Lost Symbol it is not, but it’s subtle and moving in a way that Dan Brown dreams of being." (Sorry, Dan!)The Fearless Reviews website takes just two paragraphs to give a strong impression of the content and themes in my stories, and sums it up with this: "This is a beautifully written, thoughtful collection well worth reading."In my local paper, the Woodstock Times (scroll down to Storytellers), I was flattered to be reviewed along with one of my writing heroes, James Lasdun. Reviewer Paul Smart says "...the use of a fractured story structure, where characters, actions and similar reactions come together over time, lend the overall work the tragic air of great epics, with people doing all they can to escape fate's plans for them; and yet also the bittersweet quality we recognize in the best comedies, where folks keep pressing on, no matter what pushes them back."

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    Saraceno - Brent Robison

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