Literary Nonfiction. THE ART OF READING ITALIAN AMERICANA is a celebration of the "Art of Reading," in which the reader and writer engage in dialogue. This book covers the ten-year period since Fred Gardaphe's DAGOES READ, from 1995-2005, and includes most of the reviews he published in Fra Noi during that period, along with a few longer reviews and review essays published elsewhere, to provide an in-depth view of the production of Italian American writers. This book, then, offers an answer to the question raised so many years ago in the New York Times "Where are the Italian American Writers?"