These ten magical stories are primarily set in Pittsburgh-area river towns, where Italian American women and girls draw from their culture and folklore to bring life and a sense of wonder to a seemingly barren region of the Rust Belt. Each story catapults the ordinary into something original and unpredictable.
    A skeptical journalist scopes out the bar where the town mayor, in seemingly perfect health, is drinking with his buddies and celebrating what he claims is the last day of his life. A woman donates her dead mother’s clothes to a thrift shop but learns that their destiny is not what she expected. A ten-year-old girl wrestles with the facts of life as she watches her neighbor struggle to get pregnant while her teenage sister finds it all too easy. A high school girl hallucinates in a steamy hospital laundry room and discovers she can see her coworkers’ futures. A developer’s wrecking ball is no match for the legend of Giovanna’s green thumb in the title story “Giovanna’s 86 Circles.”
    Quirky and profound, Corso’s magical leaps uncover the everyday poetry of these women’s lives.

Finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award

Selected for “Best Short Stories of 2005” in Montserrat Review

Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Sons of Italy National Book Club Selection
 

“Giovanna’s 86 Circles is an appealing gathering of short fiction at a time when American culture is changing radically. Corso's characters are Old World people vulnerable to the assault of contemporary capitalism, but dreaminess relieves the stresses of their lives. Her prose is inviting in its clarity and music as she creates a world that is at once familiar and strange. Corso’s debut collection is at the same level of literary achievement as Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Junot Diaz’s Drown.”—David Huddle, author of The Story of a Million Years

"With her swift and gritty sentences, Corso conjures a world where houses were painted gray since the mill soot would turn them that color anyway, where Jell-O and pineapple salad stood for dessert. It was a humble if pinched society, down on its luck but at least rich in tradition. Corso honors that fact in Giovanna's 86 Circles, and then some." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Corso's strong ethnic narratives in Giovanna's 86 Circles are remniscent of those by Toni Morrison."-Pittsburgh Magazine