Drawing on rare sources and archival material, Helen Barolini has here collected 56 works by Italian American women writers. The volume features: prose, poetry, one play and a large section of fiction.

Publishers Weekly calls Helen Barolini's now-classic novel of immigration "an ambitious saga which spans the history and probes some of the tensions of the Italian American... Panoramic, descriptive and solidly crafted." When the book was first published in 1979, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it "an important novel for these times. . . . Through a dazzling interplay of American and Italian characters in both countries, Helen Barolini delineates the major concerns of all thinking American ethnics." This is no less true today, as this republication restores Umbertina to...