Paola Corso - Catina's Haircut: A Novel in Stories

Catina’s Haircut spans four generations of a peasant family in the brutal poverty of post-Unification southern Italy and in an immigrant’s United States. The women in these tales dare to cross boundaries by discovering magical leaps inherent in the landscape, in themselves, and in the stories they tell and retell of family tragedy at a time of political unrest. Through an oral tradition embedded in the stone of memory and the flow of its reinvention, their passionate tale of resistance and transformation courses forward into new generations in a new world.

A woman threatens to join the land reform struggle in her Calabrian hill town, against her husband’s will, during a call for revolution in 1919. A brother and sister turn to the village sorceress in Fascist Italy to bring rain to their father’s drought-stricken farm. In Pittsburgh, new immigrants witness a miraculous rescue during the Great Flood of 1936. A young girl courageously dives into the Allegheny River to save her grandfather’s only memento of the old country. With only broken English to guide her, a widow hops a bus in search of live chickens to cook for Easter dinner in her husband’s memory. An aging woman in the title story, “Catina’s Haircut,” is on a quest to cut ankle-length hair as hard as the rocky soil of Calabria in a drought. A lonely woman, who survived World War II bombings in her close-knit village, struggles to find community as a recent immigrant. A daughter visits her mother’s hill town to try and fulfill a wish for her to see the Fata Morgana. These haunting images permeate Corso’s linked stories of loss, hope, struggle, and freedom.

"Corso follows an Italian family through four generations from the Calabrian town of San Procopio to Pittsburgh in this fable-like follow-up to Giovanna's 86 Circles.... The stories, individually, find moments of inspired, ethereal revelation."
—Publishers Weekly

"Rich in history, Paola Corso's Catina's Haircut is an imaginative look at the Italian experience in America. Corso's small, vivid stories end up being writ large, alternately personal and universal."
—Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

"Whether you're a first or seventh-generation Italian American, this novel will speak to you about the reasons your family left Italy. You'll also gain insight into how they turned miseria into miracles and built working-class identities that enabled them to survive a new world."
—Fred L. Gardaphe, Fra Noi

"Paola Corso is the Italo Calvino of our time. In Catina's Haircut we enjoy history, folklore, cultural traditions, and magic realism. This is enough to satisfy any hungry reader, but there is more. Corso's characters are not archetypes; they are living breathing, loving, losing, winning, true human beings. We know them through several phases in this book from Italy, the Mother Country, to relocation in the USA. It is the humor I love the most—the wryness—the sweetness in these people’s souls. Paola will be remembered for this. Italo Calvino, at the time of his death in 1956, was the most translated of Italian contemporary authors. Let us hope for an equal readership for Paola Corso."
—Grace Cavalieri
Producer/host "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress"

Paola Corso's Catina's Haircut is a collection of short stories that manages in just over a hundred pages to create a family epic, two countries, and several eras. It moves from Calabria, Italy at the very turn of the twentieth century to Pittsburgh in the industrial steel mill mid-twentieth century, and into the twenty first century as well. Destructive drought and deadly flood waters alternate as Corso's characters try to live in their old world and their new one. She's especially good at the play between tales and fables and a brilliantly solid, earthbound realism: a literary rendering of a family’s story and its soul.
—Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers

"Catina's Haircut taps into deep places of storytelling—collective memory and imagination, folklore and social history—to bring together in one book the Fata Morgana, live chickens, the Risorgimento, and the Pittsburgh Steelers."
—Adria Bernardi, author of Openwork

"Here are important stories of loss and retrieval in an Italian family. We become witnesses to the courageous and undeniably Italian struggle of the last century’s immigrants and consequently to that constant spark of human spirit in all people."
—Gioia Timpanelli, author of What Makes A Child Lucky

"From the hard, unforgiving soil of Calabria to the congested neighborhood of Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield section, the stories in Catina's Haircut eloquently present the narrative of the Italian immigrant in America. Corso's eye is sharp, fiercely honest yet also able to linger over unexpected beauty when it appears in this demanding landscape."
—Hilary Masters, Carnegie Mellon University

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Read about Catina's Haircut on Psychology Today.

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