Born of Italian-American parents, Helen Barolini rediscovered her culinary heritage when she married Italian writer Antonio Barolini and lived for some years in Italy. Festa is a year-long feast of memories and delicious, traditional Italian dishesâfrom St. Nicholas sweetmeats in December and perciatelli with sardines and fennel for March’s St. Joseph’s Day, to figs with prosciutto for summer’s Ferragosto and pumpkin gnocchi for an American Thanksgiving in Italy.

Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Barolini, Helen

Regional & International

Harcourt

Born of Italian-American parents, Helen Barolini rediscovered her culinary heritage when she married Italian writer Antonio Barolini and lived for some years in Italy. Festa is a year-long feast of memories and delicious, traditional Italian dishes—from St. Nicholas sweetmeats in December and perciatelli with sardines and fennel for March’s St. Joseph’s Day, to figs with prosciutto for summer’s Ferragosto and pumpkin gnocchi for an American Thanksgiving in Italy.

Festa: Recipes and recollections of Italian holidays

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

“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.

Chiaroscuro: Essays on Identity: Revised Edition

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Wisconsin Press

Born of Italian-American parents, Helen Barolini rediscovered her culinary heritage when she married Italian writer Antonio Barolini and lived for some years in Italy. Festa is a year-long feast of memories and delicious, traditional Italian dishes—from St. Nicholas sweetmeats in December and perciatelli with sardines and fennel for March’s St. Joseph’s Day, to figs with prosciutto for summer’s Ferragosto and pumpkin gnocchi for an American Thanksgiving in Italy.

“In this second novel the author thoughtfully tackles the pain involved when loving together and living together turn out to be irreconcilable.”—The New York Times

Love in the Middle Ages

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

iUniverse

When lonely, middle-aged Donna and Bud marry, they encounter the bittersweet trials of trying to reconcile her WASP bluestocking approach to life with his second-generation immigrant outlook

William Morrow & Co.

A collection of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays portrays the conditions of life of Italian American women

The Dream Book: An Antology of Writings by Italian American Women

History & Criticism

Schocken

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)

A Circular Journey

Fordham University Press

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)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Barolini, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Barolini, Helen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Barolini, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays

Festa: Recipes and recollections of Italian holidays

Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays

Chiaroscuro: Essays on Identity: Revised Edition

Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays

Love in the Middle Ages

Love in the Middle Ages

The Dream Book: An Antology of Writings by Italian American Women

A Circular Journey

A Circular Journey