"Like most of Valerio's narrative fiction, 'The Little Sailor' alchemically combines personal and popular cultural histories; but unlike the earlier work, this opus resolves the logic and emotion of its protagonist's episodic memory in a linear plot, transmuting the Little Sailor's childhood experience of his community (particularly its women) in the first section, 'Brooklyn, Rome, ' into the action of second section, 'The Bensonhurst Pigeon, ' a whimsical adaptation of Hammett's and Huston's The Maltese Falcon."--(Professor G. Guida, CUN