The Closer We Are to Dying: A Memoir of Father and Family

In the 1950s in Fort William, Ontario, everyone knew Dusty Fiorito. He was handsome and hard and hot-tempered. A letter carrier, a small-town trombonist, an occasional crooner, and a heavy drinker, Dusty was both the keeper and maker of his Italian family’s many stories. At the end of his life, as Dusty lay dying in a hospital, Joe sat with him at night, listening one last time to the family legends. Rich and compelling, The Closer We Are to Dying is Joe Fiorito’s brilliant tribute to a complicated man and an affecting testament to the power of family ties.

FIORITO, Joe

Parenting & Relationships

Picador

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

The Closer We Are to Dying

The Closer We are to Dying

Self-Help

Death & Grief

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

MCCLELLAND STEWART

The Closer We Are to Dying is newspaper columnist Joe Fiorito's spectacular debut as a book writer. A natural story-teller, Fiorito's extraordinary talent is revealed in prose that is spare, tough, and tender. In this memoir of his family, he writes with a full heart, wielding language like a knife. In the 1950s in Fort William, Ontario, when Joe Fiorito was growing up, it was wrong to be poor and Italian, and risky to be bookish - and he was all of these. He was also marked as a member of a lively and infamous clan. Strangers could size him up at a glance and tell he was a Fiorito; Dusty's boy. Everyone knew Dusty. He was handsome and hard and hot-tempered. He was a man his son loved and loathed with equal fervour. And it is Dusty who occupies the heart of this book. A letter carrier, a small-town trombonist and occasional crooner, a heavy drinker, Dusty was both the keeper and maker of the family's many stories. At the end of his life, as Dusty lay dying in hospital, Joe sat with him at nights, listening one last time to the family legends, now burnished to a perfect lustre by repeated tellings - stories too fantastic to be fiction, too pointed to be entirely true. Stories narrated in exquisite style in The Closer We Are to Dying. Fiorito's striking talent is revealed both in his laconic prose and superlative story-telling, and in the affection and empathy of his vision. The Closer We Are to Dying is a beautiful reminder that while only the powerful are remembered in the history books, the lives of the powerless can also be the stuff of enduring myths.

A year after concert pianist Dominic Amoruso’s mysterious disappearance during a private recital in Toronto, his friend, the journalist Joe Serafina, receives a package of Dom’s tapes and notebooks from a place called Wolf Cove on Baffin Island. By transcribing the tapes and matching them with entries in the notebooks, Joe slowly pieces together the story of what happened to his friend.\nDom has grown up in the deep shadow of Glenn Gould – and in the shadow of expectations that he carry on Gould’s heritage. It is a heavy load, one he struggles and argues with constantly, challenging Gould’s decisions even as his own identity as a musician disintegrates. Freely popping a variety of pills to ward off migraines and other, more existential pains, Dom confides only in his tape recorder. When Joe starts nosing around, he finds that Dom’s friends, such as the music store owner Buddy Keane, the photographer Carol Paterson, and his lover, Claire Weller, are either as perplexed as he is by Dom’s sudden disappearance or annoyed by the journalist’s interest.\nFiorito has woven his novel from the separate strands of Dom’s tapes and notebooks and from Joe’s investigation into the pianist’s story. Brilliantly conceived and expressed, and with an exquisite sense of place, the story takes us from downtown Toronto’s Vietnamese restaurants and homeless shelters to seal-skinning contests on Baffin Island. The Song Beneath the Ice is a dazzling novel of extraordinary ambition and accomplishment.

The Song Beneath the Ice

Literature & Fiction

McCelland & Stewart, Toronto

The critically acclaimed author of The Closer We Are to Dying now turns his penetrating gaze to the big city he calls home. Toronto is the city that Canadians love to hate. But they don’t know this city, says Joe Fiorito. Even Torontonians don’t really know this city because it changes every day. It’s not a finished thing, it’s a work in progress. It’s New York in 1900, arms open wide to welcome the huddling masses. Union Station is Fiorito’s tour of his adopted city, from his own neighbourhood, Parkdale, through corner stores and local bars, to the suburban high rises that are home to new immigrants, and to the shelters that offer a tough bed to the many homeless. Fiorito’s Toronto exists here, on the street, in places where diverse cultures jostle side by side and where mercy is free. Fiorito’s subtle and detailed observations of life in the city are matched by his precise, sinuous prose. On every page, these talents provide a dazzling showcase for the vivid, tender stories he crafts. In the end, we have to agree when he says Toronto will not be a fine town when it is finished. It is a fine town because it is unfinished.

Union Station: Stories of the New Toronto

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The critically acclaimed author of The Closer We Are to Dying now turns his penetrating gaze to the big city he calls home. Toronto is the city that Canadians love to hate. But they don’t know this city, says Joe Fiorito. Even Torontonians don’t really know this city because it changes every day. It’s not a finished thing, it’s a work in progress. It’s New York in 1900, arms open wide to welcome the huddling masses. Union Station is Fiorito’s tour of his adopted city, from his own neighbourhood, Parkdale, through corner stores and local bars, to the suburban high rises that are home to new immigrants, and to the shelters that offer a tough bed to the many homeless. Fiorito’s Toronto exists here, on the street, in places where diverse cultures jostle side by side and where mercy is free. Fiorito’s subtle and detailed observations of life in the city are matched by his precise, sinuous prose. On every page, these talents provide a dazzling showcase for the vivid, tender stories he crafts. In the end, we have to agree when he says Toronto will not be a fine town when it is finished. It is a fine town because it is unfinished. From the Hardcover edition.

Union Station: Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto

In this award-winning collection from his Montreal Gazette city columns, Joe Fiorito reveals the true heart and soul of a large city. He walks the streets, meeting and talking to the people who make the city tick but never make the front-page news. In Tango on the Main he introduces us to Jackie of the Ritz, Montreal's chambermaid to the stars...the itinerant who reads Tennyson and drinks his daily pint of vodka on the McGill campus...the former featherweight champ who spends his mornings at the gym and his afternoons taking care of his ailing wife -- to name but a few of the memorable characters whose lives he explores.

Tango on the Main

Essays & Correspondence

Signature Editions

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