Subway to California
By (Author) Joseph Di Prisco
Rare Bird Books
Rare Bird Books
18th July 2017
United States
Paperback
386
Width 139mm, Height 215mm
In 1961, the Di Priscos fled Brooklynand the FBI. The father was a gambler and bookmaker, and agents chased him into the Long Island woods because he was implicated in police corruption. At thirty-five he escaped to a strange place called California, where his wife and two of her four sons joined him. One member of the family graduated high school, and he would make books of a different sort.
Joe didnt seem called to a life of crime, but evidence is mixed. Once he was Brother Joseph in a Catholic novitiate, but later he was named prime suspect in a racketeering investigation. During Vietnam he seized his college administration building, and then played blackjack around the world, staked by big-money backers. He managed Italian restaurants with laughable ineptitude, but also did graduate study and taught for twenty years. Eventually Joe buries his unstable, manipulative, and beautiful mother and his brothers, including his heroin-addicted younger brother. Later, he cares for his father with Alzheimers. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, Subway to California recounts Joes battles with personal demons, bargains struck with angels, and truces with family in this richly colorful tale that reads like great fiction.
"A beautiful, heartfelt, sometimes funny, occasionally harrowing story of a man making his way through the minefield of his own family history. Di Prisco has lived more lives than most of us, and managed to get it all down in this riveting book." Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and Bad Sex On Speed Di Prisco delivers thoughtful contemplation of the human condition and plenty of self-examination that reveals how he made it to where he is, and why he survived when others didnt. His sharp wit and hard-won wisdom make Subway to California a story that anyone whos risen out of a hardscrabble life with the odds stacked against them will love and learn from. ForeWord Reviews [Di Prisco] can break your heart recalling the most romantic memory of his life or make you laugh out loud when, for example, he defines the Catholic notion of Limbo: not a horrible place, not a great place, sort of like parts of Staten Island.Kirkus Reviews "Brimming with humor, heartbreak, and at times the feel an old time Catholic confessional, Subway to California is a one-of-a-kind read. Joseph Di Prisco's story evokes a time and place that is no longer part of the American landscape; a place where loyalty to family, neighborhood, and way of life was the norm. At A Great Good Place for Books we can't wait to place it in our customers' hands." Kathleen Caldwell, A Great Good Place for Books From his tough, chaotic childhood and the tortuous misadventures of his young adulthood, Joseph Di Prisco has crafted an achingly tenderand frequently funnymemoir, a book replete with all the rich unfolding and poetic reflection of a novel, and all the focused research and unsparing truth-seeking of biography. Moving seamlessly between past and present, between the Church and the casino, scholarship and addiction, Brooklyn and the Bay Area, Di Prisco gives us a dizzying aerial view of a life, and of a familyan account that is at once an intimate meditation on the authors interior life, and a gripping family history reaching back to Ellis Island in the 1920s. Threaded throughout is the authors irreverent, ecstatic love of words, of storytelling, an affirmation of the transcendent grace that literature can offer. Di Priscos prose, like his poetry, is imbued with a rare warmth and graceand hes brought these talents to bear on his remarkable personal history in this captivating memoir. Laura Cogan, Editor-in-Chief, ZYZZYVA What Joe DiPrisco has written here is likely to become the standard-bearer for all future memoirs A comedy and tragedy filled with paternal pratfalls, missteps and odd criminal adventures, all of which cast Joe onto the road as a gambler, teacher, writer, political activist, accused criminal in his own right, father and husband, and so much more! This Subway ride is the real deal. Steven Gillis, The Consequence of Skating and The Law of Strings
Joseph Di Prisco was born in Brooklyn and lives today in Northern California, with his wife, photographer Patti James. Hes the author of the novels All for Now, The Alzhammer, The Confessions of Brother Eli, and Sun City, books of poems, and books about childhood and adolescence. Di Priscos memoir The Pope of Brooklyn is the follow-up to Subway to California.