Who Is Lou Sciortino?

A Novel About Murder, the Movies, and Mafia Family Values

Ottavio Cappellani; Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

Download Image Ottavio Cappellani; Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis Who Is Lou Sciortino?
Buy it now

Available Formats

Book
Ottavio Cappellani’s wildly entertaining Mafia comedy takes us into the unhinged world of a family that makes the Sopranos look like the Waltons. As blood-red as a good bottle of Sicilian wine, Who Is Lou Sciortino? is an exhilarating debut from one of Italy’s brightest young talents.

Growing up on the streets of New York, young Lou Sciortino learned many lessons from his grandfather, Don Lou: that whiners are fools; that in order to get respect from other people, you sometimes have to whack a guy; and that the movie business is a perfect place to make dirty money clean. So when young Lou is set up as the head of Starship Pictures, everybody’s happy. That is, until the day a rival Mafia family plants a bomb in their offices. Nobody’s happy after that, especially not Don Lou, who decides to send his grandson to Sicily to stay out of danger; after all, a really nice, decent person like Lou just doesn’t take part in Mafia warfare.

Not long after young Lou goes to work for Uncle Sal Scali—a hapless Mafia boss from Catania who can’t even keep the peace in his own neighborhood—a cop is killed during a routine robbery and young Lou is chosen to bring the situation under control. But there’s someone else Sal has to reckon with: Lou’s grandfather. Don Lou doesn’t like the way things are shaping up in Sicily, and decides it’s time he paid one last visit to the old country. That’s when the bullets really start to fly.

Connect with the Author

Sign Up for
Author Updates

Macmillan Newsletter

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

Book Excerpts

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

He was sitting by the cast-iron stove, in the old armchair that had taken on his shape, toying with his grafting knife. Poor hopeless innocent that you were, you thought for a moment that with a thin blade like that he couldn’t even stab a dog. But your grandpa could peel a man like a potato, then leave him lying there, skinned alive, reflecting on his sins.

 “Better an innocent man on the inside than a guilty man on the outside,” he was saying. Grandpa had been inside several times, and had never complained, he went in and out of the can like he was going to an opening

Read the full excerpt

Back

About the Author

Ottavio Cappellani; Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis

Ottavio Cappellani is a journalist with a daily column in La Sicilia. He lives in Catania, Sicily, where he writes for several other Italian newspapers, fronts a post-punk band, and cultivates carob trees and olives. Who Is Lou Sciortino? is his first novel.

Ottavio Cappellani

Back

Buy the Book

Available Formats and Book Details

Who Is Lou Sciortino?
A Novel About Murder, the Movies, and Mafia Family Values
Ottavio Cappellani; Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
May 2007
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780374289812
ISBN10: 0374289816
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages
$20.00
Buy
Back

From The Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Latest on Facebook

Latest on Twitter

Back

{ About }

{ Services }

{ Store }

{ Publishers }

Education

Children's

© 2011 Macmillan