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Off the Page Author Series

Salvatore Scibona Author Visit

National Book Award Finalist Salvatore Scibona visits Firestone Park Branch Library as part of the publicity tour to promote his new novel The Volunteer, out March 5th, 2019.

Salvatore Scibona's first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Whiting Award; and the New Yorker named him one of its "20 Under 40" fiction writers to watch. He is the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

The Volunteer begins as a small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport. In order to understand this heartbreaking scene, the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a young man named Vollie Frade enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie’s path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning. An odyssey of loss and salvation, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest traditions of American storytelling.

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