Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story

A cover reveal and a behind-the-scenes look at my first novel (mostly a novel) for adults

Original oil painting and cover design by William Sulit

She was never ordinary, not to me. She was my mother’s mother—taller than most women seemed to be, a nicknamer, a gift giver, a woman who once carried a poor painting home from a flea market because, as the story went, she just knew (intuitive genius) that, behind its brown paper backing, there must be (there were) wads of fugitive cash. She died when I was nine years old and had been dying for most of my life. In all the decades afterward, I found her in the sky.

A few years ago, the outlines of Margaret Finley D’Imperio’s life were revealed to me by way of a long-lost box and a misplaced letter written by the woman I called my aunt. My grandmother’s favorite song. Her genealogy. An address. Her employment at a yarn factory called Fleisher’s, a magnificent and culturally progressive facility at Philadelphia’s 26th and Reed.

My grandmother as essence.

My grandmother as dreams.

Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, my first novel for adults (Tursulowe Press, April 1, 2025), yields the grandmother I remember and imagine. It is a story framed by Peggy Finley’s final days, as she recalls the year 1918 in her city, when she was sixteen. There is a war on. There is scarcity and suspicion, the draft and the Sedition Act, race riots and a coming pandemic, men gone missing, but, also: softball games, limerick contests, the Reading Terminal Market, the Willow Grove Amusement Park, Horn & Hardart. There is yarn, the incessant clack of needles, the deafening sound of machines. And there is, as Peggy Finley’s thoughts drift in and out of time, a nine-year-old girl who was just like me.

Who is me. Even now.

I could write an entire book about my affection for Jessie Williams Burns of Tursulowe Press, who carries into her life and work both the intelligence and integrity of her father, the great poet C.K. Williams, and the many gifts of her mother, Sarah Jones Williams, copy editor supreme. I could write a poem, perhaps someday I’ll write that poem, about the cover of this book, an oil painting by my husband, William Sulit. I could speak of how all I ever really wanted as a writer was to publish a novel for adults—a novel that would also speak to the imagination and conscience of teens—and how I ended up writing a novel that is also part memoir and also very much history.

But in the end what matters is the book itself—what it became, how it found its own ending. The book, which will be distributed by Ingram, is now available for pre-order from Tursulowe. Each pre-ordered book will be personalized with an autograph and accompanied by a bookmark that features some original art by me.

Soon the book’s opening pages will be presented in issue 75 of Icarus Magazine, Ireland’s oldest art journal, edited by Cat Grogan and Louise Norris. It is entirely right that the dreams of my Irish grandmother will first be unveiled by this beautiful (and historic) Irish journal. I’ll share those pages in a future Substack, for the story of that excerpt is a story all its own.