Where Are Your People From?: A Novel in Stories

"By turns elegaic and brimming with vivid, immediate life, James De Monte's collection evokes the soul and concern of Carlo Levi and the gorgeous rough detail of the Appalachian writer Breece Pancake. The reach is bold, novelistic, the individual stories break ground into the soil of Frank O'Connor's 'submerged populations.'" -Varley O'Connor, author of The Welsh Fasting Girl and The Master's Muse

"Where Are Your People From? is a completely original, ambitious collection of stories skillfully united by voice, place, and spirit. While spanning decades of struggle in one Italian-American family, De Monte writes with both humor and pathos of these complex, unvarnished working-class lives. He never takes the easy way out. With lively descriptions and dialogue crackling with authenticity, he makes every scene count. Through it all, the underground rivers of human connection that sustain us against the powers that threaten our dignity, our humanity, run undammed, unstoppable." -Jim Ray Daniels, author of The Perp Walk and Gun/Shy

"Live as long as Jack Agostini, the protagonist of James De Monte's outstanding novel-in-stories Where Are Your People From? and you'll find the book's titular question gets harder to answer. Partly it's a question of bloodlines, and of lines on the map ('Then what are we?' 'Tyroleans.'); of those lines we draw, or which get drawn for us, of race, class, politics, and religion; of generational lines, trapping us between the ghosts of the past and those puzzling generations succeeding us. But it's also about storylines, and how those stories we pass on-fragmented and half-embellished, but nevertheless true-give us the power to know ourselves, and the hope that we might be remembered after we're gone." -Joseph Bates, author of The Strikeout Artist and Tomorrowland: Stories