Phil Ebersole, thanks so much for the incredibly kind and generous review of my folktales collection. I highly recommend Phil’s blog to everyone. It’s intelligent, thoughtful, and always interesting.
GIOVANNI’S TREE: New Italian Folktales by Nicholas A. DiChario (2023)
I’ve been looking forward to reading this book, and I read it with great enjoyment. Nick is a wonderful storyteller, and there’s something about his prose style – his word choices, his metaphors, his ironic wit, his compassionate sense of the weaknesses of human nature – that makes his stories a pleasure to re-read.
All nine stories are set in the fictional Sicilian il Villaggio delle Ombre (Villlage of Shadows). They span history from pre-Roman times to the present day.
The village is sheltered by a magic tree, which was fertilized by fine wine and offers protection from the ravages of time. It is inhabited by an immortal witch named Brunilda. She will give you anything you ask, for a price, but her clients find that what they asked for was not what they wanted, and the price was…
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Nick DiChario 
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