Böcker av Richard Siciliano

After a long, successful career as the author of an esoteric newspaper column, "Rambling With Milton," Jock Petitte finds himself unfulfilled and at loose ends. Two failed marriages have not diminished his romantic ideals or his youthful desire to become an actor, so he begins to compose one-man plays based upon historical events and to perform them at senior centers and retirement homes.Prudence Rogers, beautiful and intelligent, has struggled with clinical depression and chronic anxiety throughout her life. When Jock meets her at the rehabilitation facility where she is recovering from an overdose and he is performing a Christmas play, he is instantly smitten. Rambling with Milton is the deeply touching story of their romance and their attempt to save each other and themselves.

One man's irreverent, humorous, and hapless quest for love and purpose.Arnold Haus has always considered himself to be an extraneous person. After suffering an emotional breakdown, he is immobilized by depression and, when his money runs out, forced to move from his suburban apartment to a cheap residence hotel in the city, where he intends to rehabilitate himself and apply for disability benefits. He is only there for a few days when he witnesses a robbery and shooting in a grocery store. Instead of remaining to help, he runs away carrying the groceries he did not pay for.Afraid and filled with guilt, Arnold slowly comes to know the other residents of the hotel, who are unlike anyone he has ever known. They, too, appear to be extraneous to society at large, but he discovers that each of them has a dream or an ambition, however absurd or fanciful. Gradually their companionship motivates Arnold to begin a business collective that sells bric-a-brac and used books and records in an old store. Though non-religious, he has also become acquainted with an elderly priest who presides over a mostly empty church and has also lived a life of frustration and disappointment. When Arnold accepts the priest's offer to be the volunteer manager of a free meal program, the puzzle pieces of his life might just fall into place as he discovers a new sense of purpose…and faith.

A quest for redemption or an exercise in futility...? In the late 1930s in a Southern port city, Joseph Curcio meets his former student Amanda,who is now a street artist selling mosaics made of broken glass and who offers Joseph a place to stay at the abandoned fisherman's cabin where she lives. Joseph is an indifferent, homeless ex-alcoholic who once considered himself a progressive intellectual and the future mayor of his city. Now he begins to find strength in his platonic friendship with Amanda and resolves to resurrect his career by writing an autobiographical journal-a diary in which he hopes to confront and understand his failures, his lost idealism, and his past relationships with his immigrant father and the woman he once loved. What he cannot see, however, are the character flaws that were his undoing and which will take him once again from the brink of success to tragedy, violence-and possibly even death. This is Joseph Curcio's mosaic journal, composed of fragments of memory, pieces of accomplishment, holes of loss, and shards of guilt and regret too sharp to touch.