Lost Aria (2018)
Carmelo Militano applies his playful cinematic eye and engaging poetics to create a series of original stories told by eight different narrators each exploring their own truths about desire. The short stories in Lost Aria are filled with sensual and evocative detail whether set in Canada, the ancient city states of Italy, or Winnipeg and Rome. Each story is a different mediation on erotic desire, its consequence, and the shifting mysterious tides of the heart; how our relationship to literature and art bends and shapes our memory, perceptions, and experience, connects and disconnects our past and future narratives. These are wise vivid stories dusted with humour, unsettling noir events, and erotic transgression.
Buy here: Ekstasis Editions, McNally Robsinon, Amazon
“Like Leonard Cohen, James Salter, and our other bards of eros and romance, Carmelo Militano explores the risk-laden territory between men and women. There is abundant vulnerability in these stories – naked explorations of the body and heart. Read them on a patio with a fine glass of Italian wine.”
“The stories of Lost Aria are as allusive and beautiful as sunlight on water. They are mood pieces, riffs on loss, youth, and the need for connection. The different narrators all want to make love and art; neither is possible without the other. And the men feel they are outsiders, shut off from the sophisticated life they need by their working-class, immigrant background. Militano writes intense, sensual prose. He evokes the geography of the female body and the erotic space of the city, whether Winnipeg or Paris. Lost Aria is packed with felicities of language and observation. The stories satisfy one after another, relentless in the exploration of the heart and desire.”
“Militano artfully situates his male and female characters in time and place, communicating their losses and longings to engulf the reader. They interact in realistic and familiar ways in stories whose settings and themes are both imagistic and engaging. Heartbreaking, amusing, and hopeful, Militano’s vignettes remind us that none of us is exempt from the inexorable passage of time, and that the experiences that mark us are the ones that make us feel most alive.”