Falling Through the New World

There are so many ways to measure time, to wish ahead and to dream backwards. Here, with grace and deep, echoing wisdom, Cynthia Reeves yields the generations of an Italian family. Loss follows yearning. Love yields to regret. Distances are traversed, reversed, and finally emptied. The only seams in this lustrous novel-in-stories are those that come at the noble hands of an unforgettable tailor who dares to leave Italy behind to stake a bold claim in hope.
-Beth Kephart, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera

Cynthia Reeves' expertly crafted novel-in-stories finds artistry in manual labor and reveals the sacred in the everyday. Twists of lace ribbon, a tailor's steady stitching, thread looped into intricate patterns to make a wedding or mourning veil, a string of rosary beads, notches in a wooden tabletop marking time and human presence: Reeves uses these heirlooms and artifacts to seamlessly bind generations of an Italian-American family, old country to new, past to present. Falling Through the New World is a deeply moving story of the Desiderio family-a history in handwork that is the truest expression of faith in the future.
-Elizabeth Mosier, Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home

Spanning three generations and two continents, the richly textured stories of Falling Through the New World explore the costs and promise of emigration from rural Italy to urban America. With meticulous and moving detail, Reeves depicts characters struggling to reconcile the beauty of their parents' customs and faith with their increasing irrelevance in the modern world. Members of the Italian-American diaspora and anyone who has sought a similar reconciliation with the past will find in this collection a voice of wisdom and compassion.
-Laura Bonazzoli, author of Consecration Pond: A Novel in Stories

Bakhtin suggests that the novel has no formal form, that instead it is voracious in its nature, digesting other form, inventing newer ones. That's what novels do, and that is what Cynthia Reeves in her new novel, Falling Through the New World, does: Effortlessly, it seems, she performs in this collection the Bakhtinian two-step, the Janus glancing glance that looks forward and back at the same time. This new new novel creates a unique physics of form, contains and expels its own unique dimensions of gravity. Its dynamic construction connects galaxies, star by exploding star, and shows you microscopic sadness in a handful of dust. This novel takes its place next to the likes of Love Medicine, A Year of Silence, and Winesburg, Ohio, but it also opens its own place and space, its own amorous apothecary, its own very vocal and evocative kind of silence and slice of time.
-Michael Martone, Author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone