Americano Sal

Featured in

  • Published 20211027
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-65-8
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

I FIRST MET Sal in the winter of 2019. I was in Sicily. He was sitting at a café. Spoke to me in English.

Hey buddy, could you spare thirty cents?

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

No name for the country

Non-fictionFor the past thirty-odd years, Hideo has worked exclusively in Japanese, publishing several novels and collections of criticism and essays. Why Japanese? is a question he is often asked. It harbours a kind of suspicion: why would a native speaker of the English language, the language of power and prestige and capital ... give it all up in favour of a comparatively minor language, a marked and ethnicised tongue?

More from this edition

The banksia revolution

Non-fictionIT IS FRIDAY morning in a moderately busy, inner-suburban Melbourne supermarket and I am standing a little awkwardly in the cosmetics aisle, completing a television...

Away from the edge

Non-fictionMY MOTHER EMIGRATED to Australia on the SS Australis in 1967 as a ten-pound Pom. I first opened my eyes at 1.42 am in the...

Pidgin

FictionNow Pidgin didn’t say much to nobody, but he was different around his feathered friends, and also with me, coming to overlook my human bits. Plus I never poked fun at him the way others did, about the slowness, the bung eyes or walking like a string was tied from his ankle to the back of his nog – you know, pidgin-like – or being good with nothing else but bird things, which never holds much bargain for others, and they’ll want to tease and knuckle what they don’t get. Truth is I was in love with Pidgin, not that he knew – though it could have been mooch, since he was always calling me up.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.