The Literal Truth - (VIA Folios) by Mark Ciabattari (Paperback)

About the Book

In the second collection of vignettes featuring middle-aged New Yorker Rizzoli, Ciabattari skillfully captures the nature of dreams, using a mixture of reality and surrealism to reveal our common fears and desires. [...] The dreams are sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, and sometimes horrifying but always thought-provoking. -Library Journal

Book Synopsis

Fiction. Italian American Studies. In the second collection of vignettes featuring middle-aged New Yorker Rizzoli, Ciabattari skillfully captures the nature of dreams, using a mixture of reality and surrealism to reveal our common fears and desires... The dreams are sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, and sometimes horrifying but always thought-provoking.--Library Journal

Review Quotes

More critical acclaim for Mark Ciabattari

"A paean to the special 'city grace' that prevails amid chaos, Ciabattari's clever and cartoonish novel is a delightful postmodern romp, more Calvino than Kafka."

--Kirkus Reviews

"A delightfully improbable blending of Borges and Woody Allen."

--Booklist

"Rizzoli is an anxious anti-hero . . . an urban everyman. [His] . . . funny, satirical, vignette-like dreams [show] the influence of media on our perception and point to our mediated lives . . ."

--Lynne Tillman, The New York Times Book Review

"With unerring irony, Ciabattari paints a shimmering, disorienting world in which the lines between dreams and reality are systematically skewed."

--Publishers Weekly