April 8, 2011

The second volume of Sweet Lemons is out, and thanks to Legas, the publisher, I have a copy to give away.

Edited with love by Venera Fazio and Delia De Santis, Sweet Lemons 2: International Writings with a Sicilian Accent is almost 400 pages long and contains stories, poems, and essays by 90 writers–most from the Sicilian diaspora. There are also some Sicilian writers in translation (Vittorino and Camilleri, to name a few) and the odd contributor like me who hasn’t got a goccia of Sicilian blood.

To be eligible to win this book, all you have to do is add a comment to this post or to another recent post (scroll down on my homepage to see which posts are not yet closed to comments) before April 14.  You’ll also need a mailing address in North America.

In “Lemon Ice Cream” Kenneth Steven remembers his early years living under Mount Etna:

If I close my eyes now, very tightly, I can smell everything. The ice cream that my father is scooping into bowls in green-white curves, the little kitchen with its open dishes of herbs and its baskets of vegetables. The windows are open and all of us–my mother, my brother, my father and me–we are all looking out onto the umber sea of the fields, and the scent that is coming in is from the lemon grove…

In an excerpt from Conversazione in Sicilia translated by Isabella Colalillo Katz, Elio Vittorini remembers riding on a Sicilian train:

The stations went by, one by one, little wooden cabins with the sun shining on the red caps of the station masters; and the forest opened and closed with prickly pears tall as forks, like cerulean stones. And whenever we saw anyone, a boy coming or going along the track picking the fruit crowned in thorns that grew like coral on the prickly pear plants, he would shout as the train went by…

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