The book cover of “Pasta Mike: A Story of Friendship & Loss,” a novella by Andrew Cotto, is festooned with different types of pasta. It’s a fitting design for a book about a fierce friendship forged in family, pasta, and the type of familiarity that comes with knowing another person since childhood.

“I like to think that Mike and I knew each other before we were born. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way or in some other universe,” Cotto writes. “I believe this because our mothers were pregnant with us during the summer of 1968, and our families lived around the corner from each other in our section of Queens.”