Little Novels of Sicily Paperback by Giovanni Verga

Product Details

• Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics (2026-10-27)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 176 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781782697077
• Item Weight: 164.43 grams
• Dimensions: 19.79 x 12.9 x 1.4 cm

AVAILABLE AGAIN: a highly anticipated new edition of 12 poetically ironic short stories of 19th-century Sicily by a realist master, translated and introduced by D.H. Lawrence.

“Intoxicating... His finest work... How acutely Verga understood the tragic contradictions that still disturb our modern experience.” —New York Review of Books

First published in a single volume in 1883, the 12 stories collected in this beautiful new paperback edition 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.

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.

About the Author

Giovanni 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. He wrote in many genres and produced several classics of Italian literature, including the novel The House of the Medlar Tree. His short stories about Sicily are widely agreed to be his masterpieces.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was one of Britain’s most important novelists of the early 20th century. He is best remembered for his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose frank account of desire and challenge to the class system led to a prominent obscenity trial in the 1960s, setting a modern precedent for freedom of expression.