Garbage Night at the Opera

Book excerpt: Fiction. The linked stories in GARBAGE NIGHT AT THE OPERA depict an extended Italian-American family living collectively in one apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, across decades as their neighborhood suddenly loses the factory jobs that support it, languishes for a generation, then gentrifies. "GARBAGE NIGHT AT THE OPERA is among the most accomplished and emotionally resonant story collections I have read in years, writes fiction writer Peter Orner. Novelist Kevin McIlvoy writes, "These interrelated stories are a group of small, intense fires that form a large-scale conflagration. Fioravanti's working-class characters try to reverse the spell of hopelessness they have been cast under by family members or by lovers or by the broken promises of Brooklyn."