History is always personal in Frank Lentricchia’s work and these two remarkable novels engage the persistent echoes of Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the fallout from a legendary Mafia hit. They’re propulsive reads, brimming with vivid characters, startling humor, inventive storytelling, and moving scenes of family and struggling communities. Urgent and relevant, they offer an ideal entry into the literary world of one of America’s most compelling writers.
Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters
Lentricchia’s Eliot Conte is once again our darkly tragicomic guide through what appear on the surface to be community, family, honor and the past, but are really the labyrinths of History, violence, terror, and vengeance. At turns sardonic and nostalgic, savage and ferociously honest, Conte – like that other Eliot – forges a path for us through a contemporary wasteland.
Stanislao Pugliese, Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian & Italian American Studies, Hofstra University
In The Glamour of Evil, Frank Lentricchia explores the visceral connections between art and violence: the classic desire to create and the urge to destroy. It’s a dark compelling vision that takes the underworld of the Italian Mafia as a highly imperfect moral proving ground. The book is funny too, but as in Scorsese’s films the humor weaves into the pain and struggle surrounding it. The lure of evil, this novel suggests, lies in the way it resonates within us, and answers an original sin that makes us long for a world in which, like a god, we can act without consequence. There is no such world, of course, and this gripping novel makes clear that no one escapes this one untainted.
Anthony DeCurtis, Author of Lou Reed, A Life
Frank Lentricchia is the Dashiell Hammett of our times and the literary equivalent of Martin Scorsese. His writing is full of “hard-boiled” grace, with every striking sentence imparting a T.S. (Tough Shit) epiphany.
. Pellegrino D'Acierno, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Hofstra University; Society of Senior Scholars, Columbia University
