Thurs., May 26
Author Vincent Panella

Vincent Panella knows what it means to be a writer. He's clocked years teaching the craft, thinking about and talking others through the process. And lo, at long last, he's turned to his own life, to his Italian roots, to his upbringing in an Italian enclave in 1950s Queens, to cull material from, to bang out in front of a typewriter in a writing shed in Vermont.

What's come of it is his new book, Lost Hearts, a series of vignettes tracing native Sicilians from the homeland all the way through to the sticky, melting-pot streets of mid-century New York. The stories are fictional but the experience -- first blush of a hardscrabble life in the New World -- is real. We talk with Vincent Panella today about his new stories.