Eugene Mirabelli

Eugene Mirabelli's new novel, The Goddess in Love with a Horse (And What Happened Next) was published in July, 2008.

Eugene Mirabelli is the author of six novels, plus short stories, poems, many journalistic pieces and numerous book reviews. He admits to being at least 78 and with any luck he'll be older by the time you read this. Mirabelli taught in the graduate writing program at the State University of New York at Albany during its heyday, and currently contributes articles and reviews to an alternative newsweekly with a focus on arts and politics. A selection of his reviews and political opinion pieces can be found online at http://www.criticalpages.com. Mirabelli has received grants for his work, including a Rockefeller Grant, has been nominated for a couple of Pushcart Prizes and a Nebula Award, and his short fiction has been anthologized and published in Czech, Hebrew, Russian, Sicilian, and Turkish.

His years as a teacher have given him an abiding interest in education. Mirabelli is one of the founders and a former director of Alternative Literary Programs in the Schools (ALPS), and he served as its treasurer for over twenty years. ALPS, a non-profit corporation, was established to bring poets and writers to the schools of New York State to give creative writing workshops.

His first novel,The Burning Air, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1959 - which, he admits, was a long time ago. This was followed by The Way In, (Viking), No Resting Place, (Viking), The World at Noon, (Guernica Editions of Canada), and a novella, The Language Nobody Speaks (Spring Harbor Press).

The Goddess in Love with a Horse (And What Happened Next) is about two entangled families — one from the island of Sicily and the other from Calabria (the toe of the Italian boot) — who emigrate to Boston where they marry and infuse their startling heritage into the New England culture. Angelo (man from the waist up, horse from the waist down) is the origin of one family, while the other derives from Stella, a woman (a goddess, in fact) so beautiful her looks could stun.

The story begins in Sicily in 1860, takes in the almost comic horrors of Sicilian history, disembarks in Massachusetts in the late nineteenth century, and concludes in Boston near the present. The linked generations make linked serio-comic episodes which display the gritty details of life at the edge without allowing the story to succumb to dull realism. Indeed, there are strands of myth and magic in this work. As the social and literary critic Robert Viscusi has said, “Mirabelli’s characters are paragons of beauty and superhuman desire that might have stepped out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like the best magical realists, Mirabelli makes even the most startling transformations seem natural, even inevitable.”

The longest of these narratives, the story of Aldo and his Irish wife Molly, is typical in the way it weaves the facts of early aeroplane design with the romance of flying in the ramshackle aircraft of 1910. This is a fanciful tale grounded in reality. The eminent sociologist Richard Alba describes the book this way: “The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a wonderfully imagined and entirely new sort of immigration novel, which mixes the mythologically rich soil of Sicily with the pragmatic grit of economic success and assimilation in America to produce a stunning hybrid of a story.”

The distinguished author Nicholas Delbanco said it most succinctly: “This book is a delight from first to final page.”

"Magic is the word that comes to mind when I think of the novels of Eugene Mirabelli. In many of his earlier novels, he does follow the social realism that we associate with the conventional social novel. But in The Goddess in Love with a Horse, he has returned to the fertile ground he cultivated in The World at Noon. In The Goddess he does not just go back to the same subject matter; rather, he takes flight in an altogether more imaginative version of the genealogical descent of the Cavallù/di Mare family. Mirabelli does not merely use myth in the conventional manner, as background to his narrative. Rather, he is a mythmaker." —Kenneth Scambray in L'Italo-Americano

"The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a magical novel. It tells a story of Sicilians who migrate from Italy to America but never lose their intimacy with ancient gods. Mirabelli’s characters are paragons of beauty and superhuman desire that might have stepped out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses"
—Robert Viscusi, author of Buried Caesars

"Eugene Mirabelli’s wildly imaginative novel The Goddess in Love With a Horse gives us the epic of the fabulous Cavallù family. The Cavallùs romp through Italian history and arrive finally on the shores of America to enrich the mingled bloods of the Republic and prepare a sumptuous banquet for the reader."
—Eugene Garber, author of Vienna ØØ

"The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a wonderfully imagined and entirely new sort of immigration novel, which mixes the mythologically rich soil of Sicily with the pragmatic grit of economic success and assimilation in America to produce a stunning hybrid of a story."
—Richard Alba, author of Remaking the American Mainstream

The Goddess in Love with a Horse: And What Happened Next is the story of when culture shock is by far the tamest thing encountered. Ava finds she has wed a centaur, something she knew nothing of until she was lead to the traditional consumation of the union. Although fantasy, the concepts and the lives of the people are real, with the centaurs lending their own flavor to the story. The Goddess in Love with a Horse is highly recommended .

"This is a book whose pages, glowing with sensuality, warmth, and a palpable sweetness, provide one delight after another. The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a joy to read."
—Albert DiBartolomeo, author of Fool’s Gold