Sicily, Wyoming

It cost one dollar.

At the Cody, Wyoming Public Library annual book sale, amidst other books that were not presenting one thing that wasn't already well known, it stood out like a bright island.

A New Directions edition, 1949, original dust jacket, with an introduction by Hemingway.

The story begins, "That winter I was haunted by abstract furies."

And so a writer as vivid as Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) and a novel that is valid as life and as art swims up upon the shores of northwest Wyoming and into the hands of a lucky reader.