NEW YORK, NY /UCWE/ - As the city reeled from the 9/11 attack a sixty-seven-year-old New Yorker began wearing his shoes out rediscovering the city of his youth and finding reason to write poetry again after almost thirty years’ neglect. The indomitability and multiculturalism of the city moved him deeply. He realized the city looks like the world in microcosm.

As he walked, pockets stuffed with notes, he remembered his friendship with a Hell’s Kitchen thug in the 1950s that inspired him to start writing fiction in 1988. He pulled his fictional account of this strange friendship from his files and saw it as an allegory for the city’s vitality and endless possibility. He saw that it goes straight to the heart of today’s news, because it’s about belonging and unbelonging, who’s foreign and who’s not.

Djelloul Marbrook’s novel, Saraceno, is drawn from his own life and that of his stepfather, Dominick J. Guccione. Guccione was a childhood chum of the notorious Charles Lucana (Lucky Luciano) and knew the Gallo brothers and other Mafiosi. His view of the Mafia was poignant. When his stepson asked him to talk about it, he gave the answer made famous by Tony Soprano: “What Mafia? You read the papers too much.”

Drawing from his own experience as a newspaper hawker on the streets of Manhattan, Marbrook brings to life a Mafia very different from the popular version. The novel’s protagonist, Billy Salviati, is based on the life of an eerily handsome and violent ex-con fresh out of Dannemora Prison and the author’s friendship with him.

Djelloul Marbrook can:
•     Explain how 9/11 inspired him.
•     Discuss the pre-Gotti Mafia of the 1950s and its roots in the
     efforts of Sicilian immigrants to belong in a new country
•     Explain why his own mixed heritage is an important element in the                        
     book and in his poetry
•     Encourage new writers, particularly those of mature age   
•     Discuss his humorous life journey—the successes and challenges
•     Talk about how he brought the book’s characters to life and tried to listen
     to them.

Marbrook was born in Algiers to a Bedouin father and an American artist. He grew up in West Islip and Manhattan, where he attended Dwight Preparatory School and Columbia. While in school he held a variety of jobs—soda jerk, messenger, newspaper vendor, and theater and nightclub concessionaire. He dropped out of Columbia in his third year, briefly served in the merchant marine and then five years as a bosun’s mate in the U.S. Navy. Poetry had always been his passion, but in his thirties he realized he needed to know himself better in order to write honest poems. He stopped writing poems and built a respected newspaper career.

When he was discharged from the Navy The Providence Journal gave him his first newspaper job and a new first name, Del. He later became an editor for The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel and The Washington Star. He then founded an education funding newsletter in Washington, DC, and later became the executive editor of newspapers in Ohio and New Jersey. Marbrook is the author of the e-novella Alice Miller’s Room, published by the acclaimed London pioneer onlineoriginals.com. A free sample is available at the publisher’s web site. His poems and stories have appeared in a number of journals, including Solstice (U.K.), Breakfast All Day (U.K), Beyond Baroque and Phantasm (California), Attic (Baltimore), Prima Materia (New York), and Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review. A book of his poems, Nail Me to This Moment, will be published by Three Conditions Press next year. His unpublished work includes three novels (Divers’ Angels, Crowds of One and Zij), two novellas (The Pain of Wearing Our Faces and Artemisia’s Wolf), and a collection of stories (Later For You). An excerpt from Crowds of One, Ootwaert’s Hoe, set in Woodstock, NY, appears in the December 2005 issue of Prima Materia.

Saraceno will be published in December 2005 by Open Book Press (openbookpress.com) and will be available for retail sales through Baker and Taylor, local bookstores, and Amazon.com.

Please visit www.djelloulmarbrook.com to learn more about Djelloul Marbrook and Saraceno, Three of Marbrook’s published poems are available at http://www.arabesquespress.org/vol1issue02/marbrook.php

To schedule an interview or request more information, please contact Erika Sumner, PR by the Book, 281-895-7190