A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America's most distinctive voices. These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer's life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini's art. Divided into three closely linked sections-"Home," "Abroad," "Return,"-the essays move through Barolini's worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There she lived for many years, becoming acquainted with the brightest of Italy's literary lights. The accomplished poet, novelist, and critic she became now lives at home in two nurturing cultures, America and Italy both. The essays are memoirs of her house on a street named for Henry James's grandfather, tales of literary journeys from Taos to Taormina, and Paris to Rome, as the young bride of a poet from the Veneto and, later on, as a distinguished writer whose explorations of identity and dislocation took her back to Italian inspirations. From a delightful account of a writing fellowship in an exquisite villa overlooking the Italian lakes to her first trip back to discover distant family roots in the hills of Calabria, Barolini moves lyrically through the generations of her life, giving form to the influences that shaped her art and her sense of self-as an American, a woman, and a gifted daughter of the two cultures she has so powerfully imagined. Praise for Helen Barolini "An impassioned and magnificent contribution to our knowledge of what it has meant and means still to be an ethnic American and woman . . . . a book of heroic recovery and affirmation."-Alice Walker (on The Dream Book) "Large in scope, in depth, and in the gift of narrative."-Cynthia Ozick (on Umbertina)

Widely reviewed and praised, this classic novel of immigration contains the lives of three generations: the successful and powerful businesswoman from a small Calabrian village, her tormented privileged daughter, and her granddaughter who returns to Italy to find her heritage. Cynthia Ozick wrote, "I read Umbertina nonstop on the afternoon and all through the night and the day it came...Large in scope, in depth, and in the gift of rapid narrative movement." Edvige Giunta sees the protagonists of this novel as "complicated characters who capture the conflicts, failures, and achievements of their gender and their culture." "Panoramic, descriptive, and solidly crafted." - "Publishers Weekly".

Fiction. "In this seminal work, Helen Barolini tells the story of Frances Molletone grappling with her ethnic heritage as she falls in love with a married man. The author takes us to post-WW2 Italy, a little-documented era of turmoil, and we discover the culture of the Italian diaspora, as well as Italy before it was 'discovered.' When it first appeared, this novel was highly acclaimed in Italy. Now, it once again speaks to us of romantic love and conflicted longing in the aftermath of war"--Christine Lehner.

"Aldus and His Dream Book" is a tribute to the life and work of the pioneering scholar-publisher, Aldus Manutius (1449/50-1515). Helen Barolini's text discusses Aldus, his education, his publishing vision, his typographic innovations, and his famous Venetian press. At the same time, this book reproduces all the illustrations, and many of the full pages, from the Aldine press edition of Francesco Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," which many consider the most beautiful book printed in the Renaissance. It also includes a bibliography of works on Aldus and the "Hypnerotomachia." This edition is certain to appeal to the historian, bibliophile, art historian, designer, and student of the many psychologically rich and emblematic illustrations that have delighted and intrigued generations of readers and scholars. The third printing completely resets the text, using digital typefaces that approximate the original even more closely, offers newly reproduced images of the art pages, and includes an updated Bibliography.

Drawing on rare sources and archival material, Helen Barolini has here collected 56 works by Italian American women writers. The volume features: prose, poetry, one play and a large section of fiction.

"A lively, lucid, and often extremely moving collection of essays."-Sandra Gilbert, author of Wrongful Death: A Memoir "Barolini's essays moved me. Their commitment, their passion, their intelligence struck me very powerfully and made them among the most incisive essays on Italian-Americana, ethnicity, and diversity in literature that I have ever read."-Fred Misurella, author of Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs and Short Time Part memoir, part social commentary, and part literary criticism, Chiaroscuro is not only profoundly original but also of crucial importance in establishing the contours of an Italian-American tradition. Spanning a quarter century of work, the essays in Helen Barolini's essays explore her personal search; literature as a formative influence; and the turning of the personal into the political. Included in Chiaroscuro is an updated re-introduction to Barolini's American Book Award-winning collection, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American Women.

"Our lives are Swiss," Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, "So still-so cool." But over the Alps, "Italy stands the other side." For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom. So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy. Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy's mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of the great Italian diaspora. Rather, they were drawn to an idea of "Italy" and its gifts-in whose welcome a new self could be created. Or discovered. Emily Dickinson traveled to Italy only in the imaginative genius of her verse. Margaret Fuller struggled alongside her Italian lover in the political revolutions that gave birth to the Italian Republic, while the novelist and short-story writer Constance Fennimore Woolson found her home in Venice and Florence. Here, too, is the flamboyant artist Mabel Dodge Luhan, entertaining at her villa near Florence; and Marguerite Chapin of Connecticut, who married an Italian prince and in Rome founded the premier literary review of the mid-century, Botteghe Oscure. Finally, here is Iris Cutting Origo, the Anglo-American heiress who, with her Italian nobleman husband, built a Tuscan estate, where she wrote acclaimed biographies-and created a refuge from Mussolini's fascism. Linking these lives, Barolini shows, is the transforming catalyst of change in a new land. Their Other Side is a wise, warm, and deeply felt literary journey that brilliantly captures the enduring effects of Italy as a place, a culture, and an experience.