Other Works

• GOSH ZAPINETTE ! humorous series Up till now, Zapinette’s adventures with her quirky Unky Berky took place in our contemporary world, as they traveled through five continents. A reminder to her readers follows, along with excerpts of reviews on GOSH ZAPINETTE! the first ever Series of world humor, which contains 15 episodes. Zapinette lives with her mother, a staunch ‘felinist’who owns a beauty parlor in Paris, as well as with Firmin, the latter’s boyfriend. The girl however feels much closer to her ‘Unky Berky’, in spite of the fact that he is “such a weirdo at times and can get on her bloomin nerves”. Through Firmin, ‘the vermin’, she learns that her beloved uncle is a ‘homey setchual’. They will travel to four continents together and the trips promise to be quite bumpy. She is part American, part French, part Italian and finds out, along her journeys to Africa and the Holy Land, that she has other origins too. THE LITERARY REVIEW: “... Be warned, Zapinette's gems of insouciant wit tend to become infectious. This wise-child's deceptively worldly innocence takes the entire gamut of human endeavor in its compass. Hardly anyone or anything escapes unscathed. Michael Jackson, Freddy Mercury, Mao Zedong, Bill and Hill, the Pope, and even Jesus of Nazareth all come under Zapinette's delightfully zany fire as she "zaps" from topic to topic in an irrepressible flux. As the century of the double zeros is with us - 2022 -, we have seen the future and the future is sham. As a healthy dose of counter-sham, Zapinette should be on every brain-functional person's reading list.” WORLD LITERATURE TODAY: “... This series is a great ramble, rather like a chapterless Montaigne popping from one subject to the next, drawing connections no one else would ever have thought of, but with Groucho Marx, say, passing on hints over the writer’s shoulder as to how to go about it. We readers chuckle along and even burst out laughing as we advance through this hilarious book, but we gather, we too willy-nilly, the serious messages underlying the frolicking bounce and jocular mode of the writing.” SMALL PRESS REVIEW: “ ... The narrator of Albert Russo’s Zapinette series, is a little girl of our time, very knowledgeable about the outside world, but also enormously ignorant of the language commonly used about it, and, as a result, very funny. Her phonetic transcriptions of what she hears and her malapropisms make of her a powerfully distorting lens but, strangely enough, also a reliable witness. Albert Russo has thankfully spared us all the clichés of the genre, and what we read in his novel is a genuine portrait of a genuine child.” This series which also appeared in the author’s own French translation and was favorably compared to Raymond Queneau’s masterpiece ZAZIE DANS LE METRO, has been studied at the Catholic University of Paris in its original version for learners of English. It was also offered to the subscribers of French Cable Television. It won best Youth book award at the Paris Book Fair. The Gosh Zapinette series is published by Cyberwit.net, India, under the title GOSH ZAPINETTE! 6 episodes have appeared in his own French version and 8 episodes in Italian translation, all to be found on Amazon and other online bookstores.

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• THREE COLORS OF THE RAINBOW, Arco's fabled Paris, Venice, New York - The story is recounted by a thirty-something writer of Italian-American descent, whose parents have settled in Paris; his mother, Emily, a New Yorker by birth, teaches contemporary art at the American University, while his father, Massimo, originally from Monza (Lombardy, Italy) is himself a famous painter. Arco is a talented author of erotic novels, his books, written in French, are bestsellers. His wife, Margo comes from a Bordeaux family of famous vintners. Although not religious, she grew up in the strict Catholic tradition, and has kept a certain moral rigidity, which creates some friction within the couple. They still don’t have children, and they live in a mansion of the secluded and very posh Villa des Ternes located in the 17th arrondissement, not far from the Concorde Lafayette complex, where Margo owns a gallery of arts and crafts, hailing from the four corners of France. Arco is a dashing and colorful young man and shuttles between Paris, Italy and New York, where he is invited to large book fairs, gives interviews, has TV shows which are sometimes controversial, since he often targets religious bigots, and presents his own English translations, for he is a bilingual writer, to students of literature at those few universities of the Big Apple that welcome Arco Baleno, calling him a modern and daring mix of Marquis de Sade, Casanova, Rimbaud and Verlaine (who were lovers), as well as Pasolini. Unbeknownst to his wife, Arco has a long-standing homosexual relationship with Flavio, a young Venitian architect of his age, he met in Paris, a few years after he married Margo. Theirs is a passionate love with, at times, furious squabbles, because Flavio is terribly jealous. The novel also provides a context for revealing aspects of three different cultures, different mentalities, all deemed from the inside, since the hero is himself multicultural and has lived in these places. It is a far cry from what tourists or even frequent visitors see.

  2021