Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingThe Queen of Steeplechase Park
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThe Queen of Steeplechase Park is the absolutely, positively, practically, almost-true story of infamous burlesque queen and magic meatball maker Belladonna Marie Donato.
Pregnant at fifteen after gleefully losing her virginity to pansexual neighborhood strongman Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, she is robbed of her baby by a pack of nefarious nuns and her embittered papa has her sterilized without her consent (legal in 1935). With the help of a besotted Francis and her top-secret meatball recipe, a devastated Bella embarks on a riotous quest through Depression-era Coney Island sideshows, the tawdry world of peek-a-boo striptease routines, a queer mob marriage, and a tasty collection of wisdom-filled recipes to find her lost child, herself, and maybe even true love. It all leads Bella back home, to the scene of her Original Sin, where she boldly faces matters of life and death, questions of forgiveness, and a holy mess only the healing properties of great Italian cooking can fix.
Contains mature themes.
David Ciminello is a Lambda Literary Fellow and the proud recipient of a Table 4 Writers Foundation Grant. His fiction has appeared in the Lambda Award-winning anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, Nailed magazine, and in fine artist Stephen O'Donnell's The Untold Gaze. His original screenplay Bruno, an Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting finalist, was made into a motion picture directed by Shirley MacLaine and stars Kathy Bates, Gary Sinese, and Jennifer Tilly. As an actor David has guest starred on Seinfeld ("The Barber"), Murder She Wrote, Matlock, and Kojak. David and his husband, photographer and podcast artist Brian Delaney, reside in Portland, Oregon.
Elisabeth Ashby is a seasoned character actor and singer with over two decades of stage experience. Having loved audiobooks since she was a little girl checking cassettes out from the local library, she is thrilled to have found a way to combine her love of performing with her lifelong passion for the written word as a narrator. Originally from Upstate New York, she now lives in Central Virginia with her husband and two cats.