Böcker av Natalia Ginzburg

'It was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.'Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, finds herself pregnant after a brief romance. To save her reputation, she marries aneccentric older family friend, Cenzo Rena, and they move to his village in the south. Their relationship is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism - and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief.At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Natalia Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.

'I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.'Four years before she shoots her husband and walks to a cafe for a coffee, a lonely young woman living in a boarding house meets an older man called Alberto. They go for long walks along the river and on the outskirts of the city; they look like lovers, although they're not.Alberto doesn't tell her anything about himself and she asks few questions. Still, with little else to distract her, she lets her imagination run wild and convinces herself to fall in love. Though he doesn't feel the same, Alberto asks her to marry him and they have a baby. But Alberto is a man who tires quickly of everything.The Dry Heart is a short, dark and psychologically rich novel that forensically examines how an unhappy marriage comes to end in murder.

Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is 17, and dreams of marrying a rich man, living in a grand apartment in the city and wearing silk stockings. To escape her father's neglect and her mother's sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini,her sweet and mysterious cousin.When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she's pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort.Nothing, not even Nini's desperate declaration of love, can stop her - but her rejection will be his undoing. The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreamsof youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.

The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg encourages a deeper understanding of Ginzburg's life's work and compliments those other collections and individual works which are already widely available in English.

Arguably one of Italy's greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer's writer, quiet beloved of her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg's books written over the course of Ginzburg's lifetime was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself and her world—and yet paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability, as well as the weight and nuance of her exploration of the conflict between humane values and bureaucratic rigidity.