Italian novelist, dramatist, and essayist Natalia Ginzburg (1916-90) is revered worldwide for the lucidity of her style, the keenness of her perceptions, and the compassion implicit in her humanitarianism. Few of her pristine and powerful personal essays have been available in English, an oversight esteemed writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz rectifies in her graceful, seemingly transparent translations. Schwartz prefaces the collection with a brisk but moving look at Ginzburg’s life—her antifascist family; her dissident husband’s death in 1944 after being imprisoned by the fascists, which left Ginzburg with three young children; and her devotion to her craft—thus setting the context for Ginzburg’s bracing essays about writing, family, home, war, exile, loss, and, in such startlingly incisive musings as “Fantasy Life,” the nature of the mind and its evolution over time. Ginzburg draws her readers into her deceptively charming essays with cascades of alluring, everyday detail, then stealthily broaches moral questions of great weight and complexity. Wryly witty, acutely observant, and unfailingly valiant, Ginzburg is a revelation, a spur, and a joy. --Donna Seaman
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Book Description
A Place to Live presents Natalia Ginzburg's singular voice in all its
austere beauty. These autobiographical essays explore the writer's life,
motherhood, World War II displacement, the deprivations of postwar
Italy, and more. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, winner of the PEN Award, has
chosen and translated this timely collection of lively, literate essays by
one of the foremost Italian writers of the 20th century.
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press; New Ed edition (April 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1583225706
ISBN-13: 978-1583225707
Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
