{"product_id":"little-novels-of-sicily-isbn-9781782697077","title":"Little Novels of Sicily","description":"First Published in a single volume in 1883, the stories collected in \u003ci\u003eLittle Novels  of Sicily\u003c\/i\u003e are drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood, reported at the  time to be the poorest place in Europe. Verga's style is swift, sure, and implacable;  he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath, and tells them with a stark economy  of words. There's something dark and tightly coiled at the heart of each story, an  ironic, bitter resolution that is belied by the deceptive simplicity of Verga's prose,  and Verga strikes just when the reader's not expecting it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Translator D. H. Lawrence  surely found echoes of his own upbringing in Verga's sketches of Sicilian life: the  class struggle between property owners and tenants, the relationship between men  and the land, and the unsentimental, sometimes startlingly lyric evocation of the  landscape. Just as Lawrence veers between loving and despising the industrial North  and its people, so too Verga shifts between affection for and ironic detachment from  the superstitious, uneducated, downtrodden working poor of Sicily. If Verga reserves  pity for anyone or anything, it is the children and the animals, but he doesn't spare  them. In his experience, it is the innocents who suffer first and last and always.\"The Little Novels of Sicily have that sense of the wholeness of life,  the spare exuberance, the endless inflections and overtones, and the  magnificent and thrilling vitality of major literature.\" -- \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New  York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"In these stories the whole Sicily of the 1860s lives before us . . .  and whether his subject be the brutal bloodshed of an abortive  revolution or the simple human comedy that can attend even deep  mourning, Verga never loses his complete artistic mastery of his  material.\" --\u003cb\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eGiovanni Verga is one of the great writers of Italian fiction. Verga was born in  Catania, Sicily, in 1840, and died in the same city in 1922. As a young man he left  Sicily to work at literature and mingle with society in Florence and Milan, but eventually  came back to spend his long declining years in his own place. His numerous books  include the novelistic masterpiece \u003ci\u003eThe House of the Medlar Tree\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"Pushkin Press Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48532164837605,"sku":"NP9781782697077","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781782697077.jpg?v=1773182903","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/little-novels-of-sicily-isbn-9781782697077","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}