Time's a Thief out in Paperback on April 3rd!

I'm thrilled to report that my novel, Time's a Thief, will be out in paperback on April 3rd from Penguin Random House's Anchor Books. My thanks again to everyone there. 

Lovely blurb from Dana Spiotta: "This bittersweet, funny, and bighearted book is also a beautiful, precise elegy to a wilder, more alive New York where anything seemed possible." 

“Tell us about your Italianness, and how it’s influenced your writing journey”

At my grandparents' house in Kennett Square, 

many, many years before I published my first novel.

What a pleasure to be interviewed about my novel, Time's a Thief, by Sonya Chung for Bloom, a website “devoted to highlighting, profiling, reviewing, and interviewing authors whose first major work was published when they were age 40 or older.” My thanks to Sonya and everyone there. 

Read the interview, “False Starts, Restarts & Dreaming: Q & A with B.G. Firmani,” here.

The Encyclopedic Palace at the Outsider Art Fair

Marino Auriti's Encyclopedic Palace will be in Paris at the Outsider Art Fair, October 19-22, 2017. I doubt he would have had any use for the label "outsider"; but he would have loved the architecture of Paris. The backstory of my grandfather's great work can be read here in my 2012 post about the Venice Biennale. 

He'd have been amazed to read that his was "an eccentric if touching case of postwar America's imperial mentality (i.e. an encyclopedic palace of the world in the capital of the United States)" as whoever wrote this on Wikipedia put it. As someone who fled the Fascists and lost his homeland, he'd have found this baffling. And likely not "touching," since he wasn't someone who dealt in condescension.