Drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood - at the time, the poorest place in Europe - the stories in Little Novels of Sicily capture life's inimitably ironic blend of beauty and sorrow. A loudly lamenting widower enters negotiations for a new wife even before the grave is filled; a donkey driver finds the patronage of the king a mixed blessing; and successful revolutionaries discover that liberty is of short duration.Full of twists in perspective and lyrically described landscapes, Verga's stories record the class struggles of Risorgimento Italy, the relationship between men and the land, and the cynical yet reassuring intimacy of life in a rural community. In deceptively simple, powerfully concentrated prose, Verga shifts between affection and dry detachment, but never turns his gaze away from life as it is really lived.



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.



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



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



One of the great European realists... In the front rank of short-story writers... Perfection... Verga listened, as a genius listens, with a profound commiseration that reached deeper than politics or sociology ever can



Surely the greatest writer of Italian fiction, after Manzoni... anyone who has once known [Sicily] can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it, nor can he fail to fall under the spell of Verga's wonderful creation of it



Intoxicating... His finest work... How acutely Verga understood the tragic contradictions that still disturb our modern experience