"In Addition to being involved in a host of activist doings, Justin Vitiello is a very complete Italian-American man of letters—a poet, translator, scholar, and now fiction writer. Indeed, Vitiello's scholarship has already graced the pages of this publication (MELUS 18.2 [summer 1993]: 61-75); but what we have in hand is his recent short story cycle of Italian-American life entitled Confessions of a Joe Rock."

"Narrator-protagonist Salvator is born of an Italian-American father and Puerto Rican mother, and his episodic and picaresque memoirs begin with the events surrounding his meeting with his bosom friend (or 'Rock') named Pascual Jose at the age of eight ('when we was getting peach fuzz where it counts'). Reminiscent of Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets, the boys build a fast bond as they talk and act tough, fight, vandalize. Salvator then recalls in 'My First Crack At It' his initiation into sex at age twelve. Delores, his partner, fantasizes about romance, weddings, and babies, whereas Salvator's earthier dreams are of 'looking for tit and territory in North Newark.'"

"To open Vitiello's book is to open a fascinating window into contemporary Italian-American urban life. A worthy successor to writers like Pietro Di Donato and their depictions of another time, Vitiello has furnished us with a gripping narrative that also succeeds in asking deeply penetrating and disturbingly ironical questions about the directions and disappointments of the American dream in our time."

C.L. Chua, review "Confessions of a Joe Rock", Melus.

"I had thought that Joe Rock was going to be--from your letters--an exercise in dialect, a kind of fictional documentary. Instead I found it very original, a way of using that realism to show a human section or slice of history. It is most readable all the way because it delights in its language but it does not subsume itself in the delights of dialect... You also get into ethnic experience in fresh new ways and remind me that so few--any?--Italo American writers have ever written anything about those Italians who burned with anarcho-syndicalist ideas and started pub houses and music societies and indeed had a classy social life--all gone because it was conducted in Italian and so few public schools ever had ITALIAN as a subject"

"Joe Rock needs wider readership, but how?

When I got to the last chapter I realized clearly the metaphoric nature that thad been developing by the way the material has been presented and there is always a message for the future added so that when one reads the last line: NOW EVERYBODY BETTER WATCH OUT. I'M GETTING AN EDUCATION that the book has an education of all the people about all the Joe Rocs and although this story is clearly Italo-ethnic, it is also clear that this is about all the Joe Rocks who will take their position on first rung of the ladder.

Don't underestimate this book. It has powerful literary values that I have not completely covered but that are obvious to any perceptive reader who will see that none has achieved this kind of amalgam before and turned it into a new form."

Letter from Joe Papaleo, 1992.