Tag Archives: Natalia Ginzburg
On Female Genius: A Conversation with Italian Writer and Ginzburg Biographer Sandra Petrignani
Translators’ Introduction Sandra Petrignani is an acclaimed Italian writer and journalist, the author of many novels, collections of short stories, and volumes of non-fiction, including a biography of Marguerite Duras and a biography of Natalia Ginzburg, La corsara. Ritratto di Natalia Ginzburg (Neri Pozza, 2018). In her biography of Natalia Ginzburg, Sandra Petrignani draws on her […]
“History’s Inexorable Demands”: An Excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s “La corsara”
As part of our special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg,” we are featuring an excerpt from the English translation of Sandra Petrignani’s biography of Natalia Ginzburg, La corsara. Ritratto di Natalia Ginzburg (Neri Pozza 2019). The passages excerpted here are from chapter six, “History’s Inexorable Demands,” and are published with Sandra Petrignani’s permission and courtesy of […]
Putting a Brave Face on Loneliness and Loss: Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family” and “Borghesia”
By Jeanne Bonner I do not think of Natalia Ginzburg as a sad figure or a writer of sad, tragic works. I’ve seen her in old interviews, and I’ve read her nonfiction work. Archival photos often show her smiling. She was not melodramatic. She did not seek pity or any kind of rapt attention beyond […]
Walking With Natalia: On Reading “Winter in the Abruzzi”
By Chloe Garcia Roberts Natalia Ginzburg’s “Winter in the Abruzzi” is a short essay about a period in the author’s life that she spent with her family in political exile from Rome. I first read it in the early spring of 2020, as I was fitfully flitting from one book to another looking for any […]
A World Filled with Echoes: On Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Little Virtues”
By Andrew Martino There are books that become a part of us in profound and magical ways. Books that become companions, whether in childhood or in adulthood, and that leave a trace of its magic on our souls. For those of us who read voraciously, most books are forgotten, or at best, leave only a […]
“Preface” to Natalia Ginzburg’s “A Place to Live,” by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
By Lynne Schwartz Natalia Ginzburg’s essays require no explication. The opposite of hermetic, they are startlingly direct, forthright, and thorough. They leave readers stunned with recognition, fixed on the inexorable paths the sentences have cleared. The limpid ease of the language seems at odds with the author’s pungent accounts of the labor and struggle the […]
Unlived Lives in Natalia Ginzburg’s “Valentino” and “Sagittarius,” Translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni
By Eric Gudas One refers, as a commonplace, to “the unlived life”; but fiction excels at dramatizing people’s myriad unlived lives. Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction links stifled hopes and ambitions with suppressed speech. The narrators of Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius: Two Novellas (1957), which New York Review Books Classics has just reissued in Avril Bardoni’s decades-old […]
Mediterranean Crossings: Nadia Terranova’s “Farewell, Ghosts,” Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
A childhood home is an archive and a map. Nadia Terranova’s novel Farewell, Ghosts, in Ann Goldstein’s translation, summons the power of the house in order to dissect the relationship between self and space, memory and reality.
Turin Between Tradition and Translation: The “Extra” Salone del Libro
By Francesco Chianese Like many other events in recent months, Turin’s Salone del Libro, the most important Italian book fair, was moved online. Although reduced in schedule and deprived of its physical venue, from May 14 to May 17 the Salone still managed to convey to its affectionate followers a sense of its original, […]