Kirjahaku

“The first time I saw Kirstin de Furia after all those years, I thought she was mad.” So begins her story told to us by Kirstin’s childhood and lifelong friend Frank, a man often exasperated by her irrational actions but bound to her as closely as the men she marries and the children she bears. Kirstin’s search for ethnic identity and her love of the arts trigger desertion of her famous husband and brilliant young son in New York to the world of internationally celebrated artists in Italy. She falls in love with painter Paolo Dardi, bears his “love-child,” and the world’s press—paparazzi, the press, television—launch a scandal from which there’s no retreat, and which becomes legend. Set in Manhattan, Florence, Hollywood and Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century, the story is rich with Kirstin’s irrepressibly colorful lovers, friends and enemies, her adored children in the not-so-distant time when sexual relationships were rarely considered casual.

Collected for the first time, these prize-winning Christmas tales--carols--of Drew Bacigalupa range in time and place from mid-20th century to the new millennium, from remote mountain villages in New Mexico to the sophisticated neighborhoods of Rome, from children in country fields or on city streets to young soldiers at combat areas, to parents and grandparents at home or abroad. Whether in the United States, Mexico, England, France or Italy, the diverse peoples of these brief but luminous stories share the joy--and sometimes apprehension--we've all known as winter solstice heralds the approach of Christmas. Uniting all is the theme of renewal, the promise of longer days and return of the sun, and our uniquely individual gifts which brighten The Child in each of us.The illustrations are from original works by Bacigalupa--his paintings, drawings, ceramics and sculptures, testament to the artist/writer's work in many media, his conviction that all the arts are essentially communication. Heavily influenced by Renaissance Man following graduate studies at L'Accademia di Belli Arti in Florence, he frequently refers to the journals and poems of sculptor/painter Michelangelo and the notebooks and dissertations of painter/sculptor/inventor Leonardo as examples of men who employed whatever medium was best suited to communicate differing concepts demanding expression.