Salvatore Scibona: a profile of the novelist and his two novels

Salvatore Scibona is an American novelist whose reputation rests on two books written slowly and a handful of stories published along the way. His first novel, The End (Graywolf Press, 2008), was a finalist for the National Book Award. His second, The Volunteer (Penguin Press, 2019), arrived eleven years later and covered far more ground. This profile is drawn from public sources: publisher pages, prize sites, and interviews and essays he has published. It is mostly about the books, because that is where the interest lies.

An Ohio start

Scibona grew up in Ohio. A 2010 announcement from Washington University in St. Louis says he was raised in Strongsville, a suburb of Cleveland, and in interviews he has said he was born in the same city as his grandparents, the Cleveland whose Italian neighborhoods shaped his first novel.

He has written about his schooling himself. In "Where I Learned to Read," a 2011 essay in The New Yorker, he describes nearly failing out of high school, working in the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant, and wanting more than anything to leave Ohio, until a classmate handed him a brochure from a college with no electives and no textbooks, only the original books. That was St. John's College, the Great Books school, and he took his bachelor's degree at its Santa Fe campus. The essay is the best short introduction to how he thinks about reading, and it explains a lot about the seriousness of his fiction.

After St. John's he went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for his master's degree. Marilynne Robinson was one of his teachers there, a fact that made for a neat coincidence in 2008, when teacher and former student were both National Book Award finalists in fiction, she for Home and he for The End.

Italy, and the long apprenticeship

A Fulbright fellowship took him to Italy to research the immigrant world of his novel. He told the Los Angeles Times that he rented an apartment in Catania, Sicily, for a year, having never lived outside the United States, and watched the city's enormous street festival for its patron saint. He has been candid in interviews that the unstructured year was hard on him.

What gave his days a shape afterward was the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the residency for young writers and artists on the tip of Cape Cod. Scibona later worked there for several years, administering its writing fellowship, and in interviews he has credited the place with teaching him the habits that finished the book.

The End took him about ten years. In more than one interview he has said it began with almost nothing: the sound of a man's footsteps on a staircase and a door at the top. The man on the stairs became the novel's criminal, and the neighborhood grew around him.

The stories

Scibona's short fiction appeared in The Threepenny Review, in the anthology Best New American Voices 2004, and in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories, a retrospective collection drawn from the Pushcart Prize. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award, according to the National Book Foundation and the Whiting Foundation. Two later stories in The New Yorker matter especially for readers of the novels: "The Kid" (June 2010) and "Do Not Stop" (January 2019). Both turned out to be early views of The Volunteer, which is covered below.

The End and the prizes that noticed it

The End is set on the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1953, in Elephant Park, an invented Italian immigrant neighborhood in Ohio closely modeled on Cleveland. It follows a baker whose son has died in Korea, a very old abortionist, a seamstress, her teenage son and a jeweler, moving back through seven decades of their lives and returning to the carnival day. Our reader's guide to The End covers the book in detail, with a spoiler-flagged section on the ending.

Graywolf, the independent press in Minnesota, published it in 2008, and a paperback followed from Riverhead in 2009. The recognition came quickly for a dense debut from a small house:

He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The book has since been translated into several languages, including German.

The "20 Under 40" issue is worth a note. The editors grouped him with Nell Freudenberger, Philipp Meyer and C. E. Morgan under the heading of lyrical realism, which is a fair label for what he does: realist settings, real places and working lives, rendered in prose that behaves more like poetry than reportage.

The Volunteer

The story Scibona contributed to that 2010 issue, "The Kid," opens with a small boy weeping at a gate in Hamburg's airport, abandoned, speaking a language no one there can identify. The Kenyon Review's reviewer notes that it became the first chapter of The Volunteer. In a later interview with the literary blog Dead Darlings, Scibona said he had seen something close to that scene himself in a German airport years earlier, had tried and failed to help, and could not stop wondering how the boy got there.

The novel is his answer. Penguin Press published it in 2019. After the airport, it goes back decades to Vollie Frade, a young man from a farm in Iowa who forges his father's signature to join the Marines, serves in Vietnam, and is drawn into covert work for people whose purposes he does not understand. The publisher's description follows him from the Cambodian jungle to a flophouse in Queens and a commune in New Mexico. In The New York Review of Books, Joan Acocella described a book that spans four generations, from Vollie's Iowa parents to Vollie, to the young man Elroy he takes in, to Elroy's son, and structured not by chronology but by a shared fate: abandonment.

"Do Not Stop," the 2019 New Yorker story, follows Vollie as a young Marine and gives a good taste of the novel's voice.

The Volunteer won the Ohioana Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Scibona received the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A public role

Scibona was a fellow at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the library later appointed him the center's director. The National Book Foundation and the Whiting Foundation list him as the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center, which hosts writers and scholars as fellows working in the library's collections.

Style and recurring concerns

Read the two novels side by side and certain things keep coming back.

Abandoned sons

The End begins with a father who has lost a son and whose wife and other sons left him long ago. Its younger characters grow up with fathers who are dead, absent or not who they seem. The Volunteer opens with a father leaving his child in an airport and then spends four hundred pages tracing how that act was prepared by the generations before it. If there is one subject at the center of Scibona's work, it is what fathers do to sons by leaving.

Faith that fails, and what follows

In the Fiction Writers Review interview he described Rocco's lost faith in The End as a pattern the other characters repeat. The Volunteer is less overtly religious but asks the same question of institutions: what happens to a young man who gives himself to the Marine Corps and the people behind it, and finds the promise empty.

One moment, approached from everywhere

Both novels start with a single, sharp scene (a carnival day, an airport gate) and then move away from it in time, circling back with more knowledge. Scibona has compared the structure of The End to a theme and variations in music. The Volunteer is wider in geography but similar in method.

Sentences built for patience

His prose is dense, inventive in vocabulary and long in breath. German reviewers of the translation of The End praised its color and also warned that it must be worked through. NPR's Jason Sheehan, reviewing The Volunteer, described how ordinary things in Scibona's hands become strange and almost mythic. Readers who struggle with the first novel often find the second easier to enter, because its story moves faster even when the sentences do not.

How the two books relate

The End stays in one neighborhood and looks backward from 1953. The Volunteer leaves the Midwest, crosses continents and reaches into the century ahead. The first is about people who stayed in an immigrant city; the second is about a man who keeps leaving. But both are Ohio and Iowa books at the root, both treat the American heartland as a place of hard work and quiet damage, and both end by declining to tie everything up. The eleven years between them are a reminder that some writers simply work at that pace.

Where to start reading

• If you like a contained world and are willing to slow down, start with The End. Read the opening Rocco section carefully, then trust the book when it leaves him. Our guide to The End can help.
• If you prefer momentum and a wider canvas, start with The Volunteer, or first read "The Kid" in The New Yorker, which is its opening in short form.
• If you want the writer's own voice first, read "Where I Learned to Read." It is short and it explains why these novels take reading so seriously.

Reviews, interviews and prize pages for both books are gathered on our further reading page. For more on debuts and the awards that notice them, browse the first novels shelf.

Sources consulted for this profile include the Penguin Random House page for The Volunteer, the Whiting Foundation's page on Scibona, the National Book Foundation's page for The End, his essay "Where I Learned to Read" and the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" introduction.