Read my article about Paola Corso, a Park Slope author, on today’s Park Slope Patch. Here’s an excerpt:

With long black hair and big expressive eyes, Park Slope author Paola Corso met me Saturday evening at the Community Bookstore on Seventh Avenue. Wearing a white down jacket and a fur cap, she led me to the children’s section in the back walking past a red velvet couch, a bed for two sleeping cats.

Sitting at a small table covered in books, she handed me a copy of her latest, Catina’s Haircut, which hit shelves in the fall.

“It’s a novel in stories,” she told me of the follow-up to her award winning Giovanna and the 86 Circles And Other Stories, also from University of Wisconsin Press.

The new book chronicles four generations of an Italian family from a town in southern Italy to Pittsburgh. The interlocking short stories are rooted in a family secret. Corso was always told that her great-grandparents were killed in a train wreck just after the World War I.

Years later on a trip to Italy, she was told by Italian cousins that her great grandparents were actually killed during a peasant uprising.

When she discovered this secret she wondered if she should investigate further to find out the true facts behind her great-grandparent’s death.

Instead, she decided to use her gift for fiction and tell the emotional truth of their lives through short stories.