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With writings that span more than thirty-five years, this book is a collection of essays that fleshes out the realities of today's Italian-American women and explores the myriad ways they continue to add to the American experience. The status of modern Italian-American women in the United States is noteworthy: their quiet and continued growth into respected positions in the professional worlds of law and medicine surpasses the success achieved in that of the general population — so too does their educational attainment and income. Contributions include Donna Gabaccia on the oral-to-written history of cookbooks, Carol Helstosky on the Tradition of Invention, an interview with Sandra Gilbert, Paul Levitt's look at Lucy Mancini as a metaphor for the modern world, William Egelman's survey of women's work patterns, and Edvige Giunta on the importance of a self-conscious understanding of memory. There are explorations of Jewish-Italian intermarriages and interpretations of entrepreneurship in Milwaukee, as well as challenges to common assumptions and stereotypes, departures from normal samplings, and springboards to further research. The book offers insights into issues of gender and ethnicity and is a voice for the less heard and less seen side of the Italian-American experience from immigrant times to the present. Instead of seeking consensus or ideological orthodoxy, this collection brings together writers with a wide range of backgrounds, outlooks, ideas, and experiences about being and becoming an American.

Novel Shocks argues that the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism lie in the battles over suburban and urban space in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the end of World War II, Harry Truman’s administration launched a national program of urban renewal that sought to create a new and distinctly American modernity, which would underpin US global hegemony. The program’s effects in Manhattan were particularly notable: throughout the 1950s and 1960s, New York bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. Taken together, these processes dramatically transformed New York’s metropolitan region, creating the segregated landscape of prosperous white suburbs and poor black cities, and with it new cultural forms and subjectivities. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, novelists such as Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all depicted and responded to these new urban spaces as forms of traumatic “shock” that required new aesthetic forms and political structures. These novels rejected older shock-based modernisms such as Surrealism and naturalism and, like the urbanization projects they depicted, forged a new kind of modernism, one that transformed shock from a traumatic and disruptive effect of urban modernity into a therapeutic force that helps strengthen and shape a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish the roots of neoliberalism.

For more than thirty years, the journal Italian Americana has been home to the writers who have sparked an extraordinary literary explosion in Italian-American culture. Across twenty-five volumes, its poets, memoirists, story-tellers, and other voices bridged generations to forge a body of expressive works that helped define an Italian-American imagination. This book offers the best from those pages: sixty-three pieces — fiction, memoir, poetry, story, and interview — that range widely in style and sentiment, tracing the arc of an immigrant culture's coming of age in America. What stories do Italian Americans tell about themselves? How do some of America's best writers deal with complicated questions of identity in their art? Organized by provocative themes — Ancestors, The Sacred and the Profane, Love and Anger, Birth and Death, Art and Self — the selections document the evolution of Italian-American literature, from John Fante's My Father's God, his classic story of religious subversion and memoirs by Dennis Barone and Jerre Mangione to a brace of poets, selected by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma, ranging from John Ciardi, Jay Parini, and Mary Jo Salter to George Guida and Rachel Guido de Vries. There are also stories alive with the Italian folk tradition (Tony Ardizzone and Louisa Ermelino), and others sleekly experimental (Mary Caponegro, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson), in addition to an interview with Camille Paglia — where the Italian-American takes on the culture at large.