Titoli in Romanzo di formazione

Returning home to New York from Europe on his twenty-first birthday, draft-dodging narrator Bunty Bronstein is frustrated with his increasingly pompous businessman father and his disaffected mother, who no longer shows the flame she once possessed. Equipped with an incisive view of bourgeois lifestyles in New York, Bunty observes the shifting sensibilities of his family members, and yet has difficulty apprehending his own place in the world.

Being a teenage literary prodigy is hard. Richard Goodman may have a book contract at 17, but his parents don’t respect his opinions, he can’t lose his virginity, and his ego inflates and deflates with every breath. Even when Richard receives the attention he craves, he finds that fame and fortune can’t deliver him from his own flaws. The Work Is Innocent is Yglesias’s fictional take on his own freakishly precocious literary coming-out as a teen.

Rafael Yglesias completed this novel, his first, at the age of sixteen. The largely autobiographical story follows a New York prep school dropout yearning for freedom and authenticity. On its release the book was hailed as a next-generation Catcher in the Rye. But protagonist Raul Sabas comes of age in a very different New York than Holden Caulfield - a tumultuous and radicalized city following the student takeover of Columbia University and assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Author, video artist, underground film actor, and superstar, the incomparable Viva is arguably the most famous of Andy Warhol's protégés - a mainstay at the enigmatic artist's Factory. In her riveting, revelatory, totally uncensored, and scandalously entertaining novel, the Factory doors are blown wide open, exposing a world of sex, drugs, and genius.

The profound coming-of-age story of a young boy growing up in rural Virginia, and the historic summer that would change his life forever. During the summer of 1959, Virginia’s Prince Edward County is entirely consumed by passionate resistance against, and in other corners, support for, the desegregation of schools as mandated by Brown v. Board of Education. Benjamin Rome, the 10-year-old son of a chicken farmer in one of the county’s small townships, struggles to comprehend the furor that surrounds him, even as he understands the immorality of racial prejudice.

Mark and Philippa find themselves the subjects of hit breakup songs in different decades and different countries, suffering years of romantic disappointments as a result. Their lives take very different paths, but when their paths cross in adulthood, they may find their biggest humiliation leading to their deepest connection.

Stephanie Lang and Christine Avery meet in ballet school. Although they share the same dream - to become great dancers - they could not be more different. Ballet is in Stephanie’s blood; her mother, Anna, is a former dancer who lives to see her daughter achieve the fame she herself never attained. Christine has lived a sheltered life, secure in the love of her family. But her privileged upbringing conceals a devastating secret.

Esme Singer is a resilient girl from Los Angeles, new to Manhattan, who takes better care of her beautiful, alcoholic mother than her mother does of her. A former fashion model and extra in the movies, her mother attracts a series of husbands and boyfriends as Esme watches in fascination and sometimes horror. Esme's father comes and goes, forever riding the wave of the latest get-rich-quick scheme.

Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post-World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age 10 when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic memory, he begins falsely but completely enveloping himself in the lives of others. He yearns to become not merely a listener to the world, but also a singer in its chorus. In doing so, Pierre’s life becomes an extraordinary document of his time and place as he finds himself a part of history over and over again.

In postwar Indianapolis, young dreamer Elly is navigating adolescence in a tight-knit family. Her search for truth leads her through a variety of experiences - and loves. To a famous architect, she is a symbol of undying youth; to a struggling actor, she is the unspoiled image of creative will; to an ex-GI, she is a thief; to a young musician, she is the source of inspiration. But what will Elly be to herself?

Growing up black in 1960s Chicago, Jean "Stevie" Stevenson came of age amid the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement, learning to value not just her race and gender but her sexuality as well. Now, nearly a decade later, Stevie is a college graduate enjoying a week of vacation in San Francisco. After getting a taste of the bohemian life, she can't bring herself to return home to her family and journalism career in Chicago.

After four years of living with relatives in Switzerland, 17-year-old Joel Scherzenlieb finds himself in the United States for the summer, working at a Boy Scout camp. There, he meets 19-year-old Corey Cobbett, a fellow counselor and the only person Joel wants to be friends with. Soon, Joel's sarcastic, distant CIA father shows up and whisks him away to live with his mother, grandmother, and older sister on a farm in Virginia - he's not going back to Switzerland after all.

Inside his home in Derry, Joe Logan's life is ruled by his tormented father; outside, by the tension and violence of the Troubles. Sometimes his father makes him run errands despite the nearby reports of gunfire. Other times his mother, afraid to be alone with her volatile and war-wounded husband, confines Joe to the home. A bright and sensitive young man, Joe finds solace and freedom in writing - a pursuit encouraged by Kathleen Doherty, a young teacher at a nearby school whom he meets and befriends.

Hari, a remarkably well-set-up young lad, has spent his entire life in a small village with his pious widowed mother, and the purity of his soul is largely uncorrupted by worldly sophistication. But now, poised on the brink of manhood, he feels himself moved by strange new urgings - urgings that will lead him far from the quiet life he has known. Though these strings are unfamiliar to him, virtuous Hari recognizes them for what they are: a hunger for spiritual enlightenment.

As she races along Canada's Douglas Channel in her speedboat - heading toward the place where her younger brother Jimmy, presumed drowned, was last seen - 20-year-old Lisamarie Hill recalls her younger days. A volatile and precocious Native girl growing up in Kitamaat, the Haisla Indian reservation located 500 miles north of Vancouver, Lisa came of age standing with her feet firmly planted in two different worlds.

Jean "Stevie" Stevenson lives in Chicago's South Side, a neighborhood that acutely feels the social changes of the 1960s. Curious and witty, bold but naïve, Stevie ponders questions such as what makes good hair and which skin shade is better in light of "black is beautiful". Amid the War on Poverty; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; race riots; and the Black Power movement, Stevie grows into a socially aware young adult with a burgeoning sexuality and pride in her identity.

Spanning the years 1939 to 1946, this is the story of a defining era in one man's life and an exhilarating tribute to the entire generation that came of age during World War II. Quince's youthful adventures begin with his first sexual encounter, a night with a girl named Moomie in a one-room cabin in Virginia, and end with the 24-year-old veteran settling down to his postwar future. In between, he falls in and out of love with dozens of women, drinks and drugs his way through two years of college and four years of military service, travels the world, and meets a dazzling array of colorful characters.

The story of a father and son - and is it true, as Wordsworth claimed, that "the child is father of the man" or can one's character actually change as one grows older?

It's 1955. Seven days before her graduation from Barnard College, Susan Levitt asks herself, "What if you lived your entire life without urgency?" - just before going out to make things happen to her that will shatter the mask of conformity concealing her feelings of alienation. If Susan continues to be "good", marriage and security await her. But her hunger is rising for the self-discovery that comes from existential freedom.

Gecko's childhood is one of sheltered, almost magical innocence on a farm in Natal. He spends his days taking barefoot expeditions with his dogs and his nights listening to Springbok Radio, unaware of the cruel force in his life that apartheid will soon become. With the start of high school in the Cape, Gecko is thrust into a political and personal awakening that is both tragic and heartfelt. With conscription into the South African army looming over him, Gecko's future is as uncertain as his country's.