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A Boy Remembers the Mafia at his Kitchen Table
New York author and poet Djelloul Marbrook started writing this jewel-like novel one night during the winter of 1988-89. His stepfather was dying in the cottage next door and Marbrook was nursing him through his last days.
(PRWEB) February 5, 2006 --
WHO: Djelloul Marbrook-author of Saraceno (Open Book Press)
WHAT: Reading and Book signing
WHEN: Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 5 p.m. *Marbrook is available for interviews; book is available for review
WHERE: The Golden Notebook, Colony Café, 22 Rock City Road, Woodstock, NY 12498
Marbrook can:
| | - Shed light on the Mafia’s connection to the Arabs (the Saracens) in Sicilian history and how the Saracens reshaped Sicilian culture.
- Explain how the idea for Saraceno came to him one bitterly cold night in a historic deserted hotel built in 1929 in Woodstock, New York, where this reading and signing will take place.
- Discuss his lifelong connection to legendary Woodstock and its role in starting his late-blooming literary career.
- Discuss the challenges of launching a literary career in his seventies.
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New York author and poet Djelloul Marbrook started writing this jewel-like novel one night during the winter of 1988-89. His stepfather was dying in the cottage next door and Marbrook was nursing him through his last days. The author had taken two homeless people in from the cold and was chucking broken furniture into the Colony Hotel’s huge fireplace to keep himself and his guests warm. Sitting in the dark lobby, he remembered his 1950’s friendship with a Hell’s Kitchen thug fresh out of the prison at Dannemora. He began entertaining the dying man with pieces of the story—and he began writing it on an old Oliver typewriter in the hotel lobby. Marbrook came eventually to own the The Colony, when his mother, the artist Juanita Guccione, died in 1999.
The novel is drawn from his own life as the stepson of Dominick J. Guccione, his mother’s earlier husband, to whom the book is dedicated. Guccione had grown up on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan and was a childhood chum of the notorious Salvatore Charles (Lucky) Luciano. The author remembers his stepfather drinking Corvo at the kitchen with some of the same Mafiosi who figured in Walter Winchell’s Daily Mirror columns. He remembers accompanying his stepfather one Saturday morning to bail out a mafioso. Dominick’s view of the Mafia was not unlike Tony Soprano’s: “Mafia? What Mafia?” he would say. But when his stepson pressed he told the tragic story of the Sicilians’ entanglement with the Mafia.
This spartan yet lyrical novel is his homage to Dominick and to the Sicilians who brought so many gifts to their new country, only to have them at times overshadowed by the Mafia. Drawing from his own experience as a newspaper hawker on the streets of Manhattan, Marbrook brings to life a Mafia very different from the popular version. The novel’s protagonist, Billy Salviati, is based on the life of an eerily handsome and violent ex-con fresh out of the prison at Dannemora and the author’s friendship with him.
THE AUTHOR: Djelloul ‘Del’ Marbrook was born in Algiers to a Bedouin father and an American artist. He grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip and Manhattan, where he attended Dwight Preparatory School and Columbia. He is a distinguished alumnus of The Providence Journal, The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel and The Washington Star. Marbrook is the author of the e-novella Alice Miller’s Room, published by the pioneer British e-publisher, onlineoriginals.com. His poems and stories have appeared in a number of journals, including Solstice (U.K.), Breakfast All Day (U.K), Beyond Baroque and Phantasm (California), Attic (Baltimore), Prima Materia (New York), and Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (www.arabesquespress.org).). A book of his poems, Nail Me to This Moment, will be published by the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society’s Three Conditions Press in 2006. His unpublished work includes three novels (Divers’ Angels, Crowds of One and Zij), two novellas (The Pain of Wearing Our Faces and Artemisia’s Wolf), and a collection of stories (Later For You).
Saraceno, published in December 2005 by Open Book Press (openbookpress.com) is sold through local bookstores and Amazon.com and is distributed to libraries and bookstores by Baker and Taylor,
Visit www.djelloulmarbrook.com to learn more about Djelloul Marbrook and Saraceno, To schedule an interview or request more information, please contact Erika Sumner, PR by the Book, 281-895-7190 or erika@prbythebook.com.
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