Renato is the sweeping "autobiography" of Renato Stillamare, a talented yet struggling artist in Boston. It was written across three decades and its parts were released in three volumes before its revision and assembly into this single masterwork. Renato is a marriage of story-telling forms, and is imbued with matters of love, sex, food, philosophy, religion, and the intricacies of family attachments. The larger canvas stretches from 1860 to the...