CANR
WORK TITLE: Animals of the Alpine Front
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WEBSITE: https://www.donzancanella.com/
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 166
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 29, 1954, in Laramie, WY; son of James and Lillian Zancanella; married Dorene Kahl (an English teacher), 1981; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Wyoming; University of Virginia, B.S., 1977; University of Denver, M.A., 1981; University of Missouri, Ph.D., 1988.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Former middle and high school teacher; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, professor of English, 1988-2013.
AWARDS:John Simmons Short Fiction Award, Iowa Writers Workshop, 1996, for Western Electric; O. Henry Award, 1998, for “The Chimpanzees of Wyoming Territory.”
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, English Journal, Epiphany, Fourteen Hills, Hopkins Review, Mid-American Review, New Letters, and Prairie Schooner.
SIDELIGHTS
A longtime professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Don Zancanella is an author of imaginative, historically inspired fiction. He once told CA: “Much of my fiction has focused on the American West, especially the relationship between the myth of the West and contemporary technological society. I am also interested in bringing to life, in fiction, teaching and schools. Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives with teachers, in classrooms, and yet it’s difficult to think of many novels or stories that adequately portray the drama of those times and places and people.”
Zancanella’s first book, Western Electric, offering eight short stories set in the American West, was called a “polished collection” by a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Among the volume’s notable stories are “Thomas Edison by Moonlight,” in which the great inventor arrives in Wyoming in the late 1870s and inspires a teenager to abandon small-town life; “Refugees,” wherein a family of Laotian refugees fails to assimilate themselves with Wyoming ranchers; “Television Lies,” in which a friendship is undone by the sudden availability of television broadcasts to a remote area of Wyoming; and “Disarmament,” wherein a military officer and a schoolteacher share a fondness for flatlands.
[open new]The Publishers Weekly reviewer affirmed that the stories in Zancanella’s “exceptionally cohesive” collection “feel novelistic in scope and scale,” as a “strong sense of how landscape and geography shape and mold character permeates the book.” Reviewing Western Electric in the Los Angeles Times, Erika Taylor declared that “Zancanella ranges from pretty good to excellent” and that “the best of these stories are indeed electric.”
Zancanella drew on the lives of famous writers and philosophers for his next two works of fiction. His novel Concord, revolving around the famed Massachusetts town, imagines a year in the life of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Storm in the Stars: A Novel of Mary Shelley depicts the famous author of the title, along with her poet husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, at the time of her writing Frankenstein.
Zancanella’s third novel was inspired by World War I–era history in the environs of the Italian Alps. Animals of the Alpine Front follows two protagonists, Carlo Coltura and Teresa Miori, in alternating chapters. Born in America to Italian immigrants who found gold in Colorado, Carlo is brought back to the mountain village of Ulfano after his mother’s death. Teresa, a teenager from the same Italian village, is sent to the city of Trento to take on domestic work after her father abandoned her family. When Carlo is sent to boarding school in Trento, he fleetingly meets Teresa, the memory of whom helps sustain him when the Great War breaks out. While Teresa endures life in an occupied household–and makes an avocation out of helping abandoned animals–Carlo is enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army and put to work mining to support construction on the Italian front. The two hope to survive the trauma of war and reunite in Trento, however upended the postwar world might prove to be.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer deemed Animals of the Alpine Front “evocative,” as Zancanella “describes the invaders with striking surrealism … and portrays battle scenes with unflinching realism.” Appreciating the somber tone, a Kirkus Reviews writer remarked that Zancanella’s “plainspoken account of the personal and social costs of war displays great empathy for those swept up in its maelstrom.” The reviewer concluded that Zancanella’s “sensitive focus is on a small region but great loss.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Antioch Review, summer, 1997, review of Western Electric.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1996, review of Western Electric, p. 1352; July 1, 2024, review of Animals of the Alpine Front.
Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1996, Erika Taylor, review of Western Electric.
New York Times Book Review, March 23, 1997, Sally Eckhoff, review of Western Electric.
Publishers Weekly, October 7, 1996, review of Western Electric, p. 61.
ONLINE
Don Zancanella website, https://www.donzancanella.com (September 11, 2024).
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 6, 2024), review of Animals of the Alpine Front.
Don Zancanella is the author three novels: CONCORD, about a year in the lives of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Serving House Books); A STORM IN THE STARS, about Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the writing of Frankenstein (Delphinium/HarperCollins); and ANIMALS OF THE ALPINE FRONT, forthcoming in August 2024 from Delphinium. Inspired by true events in the Italian Alps during World War One, ANIMALS OF THE ALPINE FRONT tells the story of an Italian girl trapped in the fortress city of Trento, an American boy pressed into service in the Austrian army, and the founding of Italy’s first animal welfare organization.
Don received the John S. Simmons/Iowa Short Fiction Award for his book WESTERN ELECTRIC. He also won an O.Henry Prize, and one of his stories was cited as a distinguished story of the year in the 2019 Best American Short Stories. He has published widely in literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, The Hopkins Review, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, The Alaska Quarterly, and Epiphany. He was born in Laramie, Wyoming, and has lived in Virginia, Colorado, Missouri, and New Mexico, where he taught at the University of New Mexico. He studied with John Edgar Wideman, Thoreau and Emerson scholar Robert D. Richardson, and John Williams, author of Stoner.
Don lives in Boise, Idaho, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife and their dogs.
Zancanella, Don ANIMALS OF THE ALPINE FRONT Delphinium (Fiction None) $26.99 8, 20 ISBN: 9781953002402
The Italian Alps serve as the setting for this quiet chronicle of lives affected, and ruined, by war.
Related in alternating chapters, the stories of Carlo Coltura and Teresa Miori--loosely based on Zancanella's family history--unfold over the years around World War I. American-born Carlo, the son of immigrants who had traveled to Colorado to make their fortune in gold, returns with his widowed father to the small Italian mountain village of Ulfano after the family experienced some mining success. Teresa, a girl from the same remote village, is sent by her mother to work in a household in the city of Trento after her father deserted the household. When Carlo is sent to boarding school in Trento, their paths fleetingly intersect in a meeting that provides Carlo with hope and inspiration during the ensuing war and his conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army. Carlo's years at war are spent in mining operations and illustrate the brutal costs of the construction of military installments on the Italian front. Teresa's war years are spent in her employer's home in the company of the rest of the household staff after the decampment of the owners for safer territory and the subsequent annexation of the home by occupying Austro-Hungarian forces. Teresa's circumstances provide her with an opportunity to prove her own mettle, and she also becomes increasingly involved with caring for animals abandoned or injured during the war. When Carlo and Teresa are reunited after the war, they are faced with negotiating life in a city and culture transformed and must determine how to proceed after living through great trauma. This plainspoken account of the personal and social costs of war displays great empathy for those swept up in its maelstrom.
Zancanella's sensitive focus is on a small region but great loss.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Zancanella, Don: ANIMALS OF THE ALPINE FRONT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332926/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=efcdbc96. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.