Wild Boys
A Novella
by Rita Ciresi
Foreword by John Cassels
paperback, 108 pages
2025
A New Title in Our American Storytellers Series
Reviews
It’s impossible to read Rita Ciresi’s stunning new novella, Wild Boys, and not be put in mind of Tolstoy’s famous quote from Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s also impossible not to love the Wild family: Jon and Cat and their unforgettable twin boys, Christian and Jordan—the eponymous Wild boys—the former of whom serves as this bildungsroman’s precocious, waggish, wholly endearing narrator. Wild Boys moves at a wild episodic pace that will leave readers breathless, in awe of Ciresi’s expert craft: one pristinely chiseled sentence atop another, conjuring, by turns, the immaculate, clear-eyed, on-the-ground precision of Alice Munro, the wit of Dorothy Parker—though no one writes a better deadpan, drop-dead hilarious scene than Rita Ciresi—and the abiding shimmering warmth and wisdom of Lee Smith. Reading Wild Boys is like eavesdropping—a documentary of a real family unraveling through no fault of its own, a kind of American dream turned upside-down, yet ultimately the story of life-altering epiphany. It’s Rita Ciresi doing what only she can do.
—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and author of The Act of Contrition & Other Stories
Wild Boys takes you into the heart of a family with a fierce and sometimes surprisingly funny truth that resonates in every exchange of dialogue, with gleaming prose that you will find yourself rereading. Ciresi understands the twin Wild boys and all their adolescent hopes and dreams in a way that makes this novella come powerfully to life.
—Marianne Leone, author of Five Dog Epiphany
This novella captures a deep and unique brotherly connection and propels the reader swiftly through its chapters. Efficiently rendered coming-of-age experiences, complex family dynamics, questions of identity, . . . Ciresi deftly sets us inside the head (and skin) of a teenage boy, and we root for him through to the poignant end. A compelling and valuable perspective on sibling relationships.
—Anne Pinkerton, author of Were You Close? a sister’s quest to know the brother she lost
About the Author
Rita Ciresi is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Blue Italian, Pink Slip, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You; the story collections Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Mother Rocket; and the flash fiction collections Female Education and Second Wife. Her awards include the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel, and the Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Contest.
Ciresi has received support from the state arts councils of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. She has been in residence at the American Academy in Rome, Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, Martha's Vineyard Writers Residency, Virginia Center for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has written the first and final drafts of most of her work at the Ragdale Foundation.
She is professor emerita of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
