Salvatore Scibona is a graduate of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. His fiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Best New American Voices 2004, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize. His first novel, The End, was published in 2008 by Graywolf Press. Esquire Magazine reviewed the novel as “Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed. Memento meets Augie March. Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan.” Scibona has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Fulbright Foundation, and a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

On The End:
A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a P.O.W. 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 in the carnival crowd, each of whom will come to their own unique conclusion on this day. The End follows them across the seven preceding decades—an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic seamstress, a teenage boy, a jeweler—and dramatically into the heart of a crime that will twist all of their lives. Against a background of immigration, broken family loyalties and racial hostility, we return at last to August 15, 1953, and see everything Rocco saw—and vastly more—through the eyes of the people in the crowd.

Praise for The End:

“A masterful novel set amid racial upheaval in 1950’s America during the flight of second-generation immigrants from their once-necessary ghettos. Full of wisdom, consequence and grace, Salvatore Scibona’s radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which The End is only the beginning.”

—Annie Dillard

“The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century . . . . The novel’s radiant beginning . . . is emblematic of both Scibona’s calibrated precision and the story’s potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona’s portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force.”

—Publishers Weekly

Excerpt from The End:

The jeweler’s mother’s intention had been for him to use the names to affix himself to the world. As in, you do not see the may apple until you know that’s what it’s called and then you see it everywhere, the words teaching you to love the things they name. But he knows this isn’t why he’s telling himself, That’s a samovar, that’s a pencil sharpener. He never used the words as his mother intended. Even as a boy he used them in the way your hands fly up to cover your face when you notice a ball headed at you, or a bird or a fly. He used them to keep material things at bay. But now the words have replaced the things themselves. The world he lives in is wholly composed of language and recrimination. He has, for example, been unconvinced of the reality of his body for some time.

Only, there are moments when his nostalgia for the world of door hinges, bull
thistle, of his mother dipping the comb in the water of the wash basin and parting his hair while the two of them observe this in the mirror, and his mother with the look on her face of an artisan over her handiwork, moments when his desire to hold a thing, a thing in his hand, to impress himself again with the dumb objectness of something, is so piqued he will do anything his imagination tells him to achieve it.

He wants the world and not the name of the world.