The Act of Contrition, a series of linked stories and one novella, continues the adventures of Fritz Sweeney and his outrageously memorable parents, Travis and Rita, that began in Bathanti’s earlier award-winning volume of stories, The High Heart.

Spanning the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, in an Italian American working class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, The Act of Contrition celebrates and complicates the operatic glories and tragedies of an offbeat family that fashions from the vault of explosive ancestral secrets its own incendiary mythology.

These fourteen unforgettable stories—a mélange of incantatory magical realism and clear-eyed documentary precision (in the vein of Raymond Carver)—are narrated by Fritz in a prophetic voice that issues at once from the very aggregate of steel town Pittsburgh and his deep yearning to escape it.