Family and Borghesia

Family and Borghesia PDF

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1681375087

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Two novellas about domestic life, isolation, and the passing of time by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century. Carmine, an architect, and Ivana, a translator, lived together long ago and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodò, who Carmine feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every evening with Ivana, but Ninetta has nothing to say about that. Family, the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, then progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle around the opportunities they had missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up. Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the 1970s. “She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse,” thinks one of Natalia Ginzburg’s characters, beginning to age out of youth: “Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and there was no holding them back.”

Voices in the Evening

Voices in the Evening PDF

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 0811231011

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From one of Italy’s greatest writers, a stunning novel “filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation” (Colm Tóibín) After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel’s narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town’s history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: “Why has everything been ruined?”

Family Lexicon

Family Lexicon PDF

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2017-04-25

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1590178386

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A masterpiece of European literature that blends family memoir and fiction An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives. Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it],” Ginzburg tells us at the start. “The places, events, and people are all real.”

All Our Yesterdays

All Our Yesterdays PDF

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1628728116

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From “one of the most distinguished writers of modern Italy” (New York Review of Books), a classic novel of society in the midst of a war. This powerful novel is set against the background of Italy from 1939 to 1944, from the anxious months before the country entered the war, through the war years, to the allied victory with its trailing wake of anxiety, disappointment, and grief. In the foreground are the members of two families. One is rich, the other is not. In All Our Yesterdays, as in all of Ms. Ginzburg’s novels, terrible things happen—suicide, murder, air raids, and bombings. But seemingly less overwhelming events, like a family quarrel, adultery, or a deception, are given equal space, as if to say that, to a victim, adultery and air raids can be equally maiming. All Our Yesterdays gives a sharp portrait of a society hungry for change, but betrayed by war. During the period described in the novel, Natalia Ginzburg was married to the writer Leone Ginzburg. Because of his underground activities, he was interned under Mussolini’s reign, along with his family, in a restricted area in the Abruzzi. When the Ginzburgs later moved to Rome, Leone was arrested and tortured by the fascists, and killed, leaving Natalia alone to raise her three children. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Happiness, as Such

Happiness, as Such PDF

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 0811228002

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from “a glowing light of modern Italian literature” (New York Times Book Review) Longlisted for the PEN Translation Award At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence—an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink—created by a family’s only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes, missing him; so does Mara, his former lover, telling him about the birth of her son who may be his own. Left to clean up Michele’s mess, his family and friends complain, commiserate, tease, and grieve, struggling valiantly with the small and large calamities of their interconnected lives. Natalia Ginzburg's most beloved book in Italy and one of her finest achievements, Happiness, as Such is an original, wise, raw, comic novel that cuts to the bone.

Valentino and Sagittarius

Valentino and Sagittarius PDF

Author: Natalia Ginzburg

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1681374757

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Two novellas about family life and fraudsters by one of the twentieth century's best Italian novelists. Valentino and Sagittarius are two of Natalia Ginzburg’s most celebrated works: tales of love, hope, and delusion that are full of her characteristic mordant humor, keen psychological insight, and unflinching moral realism. Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents, who have no doubt that their handsome young son will prove “a man of consequence.” Nothing that Valentino does—his nights out on the town, his failed or incomplete classes—suggests there is any ground for that confidence, and Valentino’s sisters view their parents and brother with a mixture of bitterness, stoicism, and bemusement. Everything becomes that much more confused when, out of the blue, Valentino finds an enterprising, wealthy, and strikingly ugly wife, who undertakes to support not just him but the whole family. Sagittarius is another story of misplaced confidence recounted by a wary daughter, whose mother, a grass widow with time on her hands, moves to the suburbs, eager to find new friends. Brassy, bossy, and perpetually dissatisfied, especially when it comes to her children, she strikes up a friendship with the mysterious Scilla, and soon the two women are planning to open an art gallery. But knowing better than everyone, it turns out, is not that different from knowing nothing at all.

The Lady in Gold

The Lady in Gold PDF

Author: Anne-Marie O'Connor

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1101873124

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

National Bestseller The true story that inspired the movie Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece—the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world. One of the Best Books of the Year: The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor. Winner of the Marfield National Award for Arts Writing. Winner of a California Book Award.