Eugene Mirabelli

Eugene Mirabelli's new novel, Renato, the Painter, will be brought out by McPherson & Co. on May 14, 2012. The book will be available at a 40 percent discount from the publisher until that date. To take advantage of the offer, please visit the publisher's web site.

Eugene Mirabelli is the author of eight novels, plus short stories, poems, many journalistic pieces and numerous book reviews. He was eighty-one at last count and with any luck he'll be older by the time you read this.

He attended MIT for two years and Harvard for two more, and there he received his BA. After drifting in an out of a variety of jobs for a couple of years (those are his words) he received his MA from Johns Hopkins, and later a PhD from Harvard, taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the State University of New York at Albany, and also led workshops in their writing program during its heyday. Mirabelli's years as a teacher have given him an abiding interest in education. He 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.

Currently he writes the online cultural commentary site, Critical Pages, (frankly, it's about anything that catches his attention) and he contributes articles and reviews to an alternative newsweekly with a focus on arts and politics. 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, French, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Sicilian; his novel, The Language Nobody Speaks, is one of the few erotic novels from the West to be translated and published in Muslim Turkey.

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), a novella, The Language Nobody Speaks (Spring Harbor Press), the controversial, The Passion of Terri Heart (Spring Harbor Press) and The Goddess in Love with a Horse (Spring Harbor Press.)

Renato Stillamare, the protagonist of Renato, the Painter, paints landscapes as if they were nudes, and nudes as if they were landscapes. One winter's night seventy years earlier in a suburb of Boston, he was found swaddled in a basket outside the front door of a large, resourceful, passionate, and somewhat rash Sicilian-American clan named Cavallů, which adopted him. He may be the best painter of his generation (he doesn't know anyone better), but his canvasses are no longer in demand, nor have they been for the twenty-five years since he last had a Newbury Street gallery show. After retiring from teaching at Copley College of Art, Renato has retreated to his studio, if retreat is the word, where he is furiously painting, painting, painting, determined to be rediscovered. Renato is a force of nature, a big-hearted, lusty, opinionated, and occasionally intemperate man of large appetites whose children (including a daughter by his accidental mistress) are all grown up and dispersed, whose best friend (whom he misses more than anyone) died years ago, whose occasional wife (the love of his life) lives in a condo on the opposite bank of the Charles, and whose life is about to become much more complicated when the goth-bedecked daughter of a former student crashes at his loft with her little boy. The uproarious story of Renato's 70th year, which he unabashedly recounts with amazement and verve, is about extraordinary things simply happening to an ordinary man caught up in living life to the fullest. A funny, touching, even magical novel, Renato, the Painter is a splendid addition to the shelf of such literary classics as The Ginger Man and The Horse's Mouth.

“This generous, sprawling, fleshy novel of a life lived among lovers, friends, olives, wine, bread, and prosciutto, is a fresco of Sicilian-American-New England life. It is also an American story that shows just how a first generation of immigrants branch from village craftsmen to engineers and artists. Renato, the grumbling bohemian painter, is the genial pater of an unusual famiglia, who is still propelled by immigrant optimism in the age of computers. He is a not-quite-successful painter or husband who loves both painting and sex with greedy bonhommie until, as an old man, he finds his imperfect life quite adequate in midst of a motley nouveau family.” — Andrei Codrescu, author of whatever gets you through the night: a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments.

“In this portrait of an artist full of lust and rage, Eugene Mirabelli once again marries the realistic and romantic modes. Renato, the Painter offers us the intimate workins of an aging man at the height of his powers who fears that they will ebb; he and his women and paintings are vividly rendered: fierce, fine.” — Nicholas Delbanco, author of Lastingness: The Art of Old Age.

“A lively comic romp through the early high promise of the painter Renato, and his late-life desperation over the art world's non-recognition of his work. Age bends and fate twists this artist, but he carroes on with his 'perishable art and human love'—the indefatigable artist as his own work of art.” — William Kennedy