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The End: A novel | 
| Author: Salvatore Scibona
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $16.32
You Save: $7.68 (32%)
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 55210
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 1555974988
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781555974985
ASIN: 1555974988
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A brilliant debut novel about a single day in 1953 as lived by six people at an ohio carnival
A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely drawn characters we meet that day, each of whom will come to their own conclusion.
The End follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, a jeweler—dramatically into the heart of a crime that will twist all their lives. Against a background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, we at last return to August 15, 1953, and see everything Rocco saw—and vastly more—through the eyes of various characters in the crowds.
The End is the unforgettable debut of a singular new American novelist.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 The changing American city via kaleidoscope & oratorio November 21, 2008
John Domini (Des Moines, IA USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
My God, the sentences of Signore Scibona! Constructions hard-headed yet lovely, precise yet inventive: "Night, for children, was more a place than a time." And: "...Lina was a child. She lacked the natural cruelty that a conversance with the marital act encouraged one to refine." And: "The city was a mammoth trash heap -- even the lake was brown -- but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side." THE END is a debut novel -- a runner-up for the current Nat'l Book Award -- and it has a lot more where that came from. Another GR guy could pluck a handful of different yet equally delicious turns of phrase. All combine skewed aphorism, urbanity with all the senses open, Roman Catholic arcana and Southern Italian superstition, and plain old perspicuity about the human animal as it ages and changes. Physical description, too, proves on the money and felicitous. As for plot, hmm, the novel's central date falls in August, 1953, a moment when "Europe was happening, right here, and it didn't fit." Didn't fit any longer, that is: on this day in Scibona's Italian-American Cleveland begins the decay that hit all inner cities during that era, largely because the "moolies"-- the African Americans -- start moving in. Scibona's opening chapters hinge on an incident in which the a miracle-seeking Ital-Am throng, out for a parade behind a statue of the Madonna, threatens to erupt in a race riot. A few dancing blacks disrupt the celebration. That disruption, as the novel goes on, passes through the prism of four or five different vantage points. The result is a metropolitan oratorio, with an bristling combination of wit and pathos, alive throughout with a brio delivered out of the side of the mouth. THE END has the earmarks of a masterpiece we'll be reading long after our own neighborhoods shuffle off this grease-stained coil.
A powerful insight into the Italian immigrant August 16, 2008
Encore Bank (Sun City Center, FL United States)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The End by Salvatore Scibona was slow going at first, but the fresh metaphors and prose kept me going, and I am so glad I did. What an astonishing first novel...the dialogue, the descriptions, the emotions touched a cord with this daughter of a second-generation Italian. Of course, I had to know more about the author, and there isn't much out there. But I am confident there will be soon when this novel starts getting recognition. I loved very sentence! CBW, Sun City Center, FL
WOW July 31, 2008
Dawn S. Miller (Colorado Springs, CO)
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
Wow, this book was wonderfully written. I was completely astonished. This new author certainly has a way with words. The way he intertwines the characters, telling us their stories along the way. He has a way of telling it like it was, and putting you right there in the midst of it all. You can just about feel the emotions yourself as you read. Imagining yourself right there beside them all.
wow. June 24, 2008
ms. ivy
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Arresting. Beautiful. Searingly insightful and educated. Scibona has a way with tone and time that drew me completely. I can't recommend this enough.
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