2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Winner
Selected by Frank Conroy

"In the Gathering Woods" contains a cast of characters who hail from the same Italian ancestors, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator s boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather a narrator who seems still haunted by a terrifying local legend that tormented him as a boy. We skip backward to a young shepherd-artist in the Apennine mountains in the 1500s, who yearns to be discovered, as Giotto was. Later, a preverbal...