Giovanni Verga

‘Fantasticheria’ from Tutte le novelle. Edited by Giuseppe Zaccaria (Torino: Einaudi, 2015). Translation © G. H. William, 1999

Elio Vittorni

‘Nome e lagrime’ from Le opere narrative, vol. II. Edited by Maria Corti (Milano: Mondadori, i Meridiani, 2001). Published by arrangement with The Italian Literary Agency. Translation © Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, 2019

Every effort has been made to obtain permission from all copyright holders whose material is included in this book. The publisher would be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions.

About the Translators

Many of the stories in this publication have been newly translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and the following contributors

Howard Curtis has translated more than a hundred books, mostly fiction, from Italian, French and Spanish. Among the Italian writers he has translated are Luigi Pirandello, Beppe Fenoglio, Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Gianrico Carofiglio, Pietro Grossi, Filippo Bologna, Fabio Geda, Andrej Longo, Paolo Sorrentino and Marco Malvaldi.

Richard Dixon lives and works in Italy. His new translation of La congnizione del dolore by Carlo Emilio Gadda is published by Penguin Books under the title The Experience of Pain. Other recent translations include works by Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, Antonio Moresco and Paolo Volponi.

Ann Goldstein is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elena Ferrante, Italo Calvino and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jenny McPhee is the author of the novels The Centre of Things, No Ordinary Matter and A Man of No Moon. Her translations include books by Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Giacomo Leopardi, Curzio Malaparte, Paolo Maurensig and Pope John Paul II. She teaches in the MS in Translation program at New York University.

Michael F. Moore has translated, most recently, The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi, Agostino, by Alberto Moravia and The Animal Gazer, by Edgardo Franzosini. He has just completed a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic, The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni. A translator and interpreter at the Italian Mission to the UN, he also teaches literary translation at Columbia University.

Erica Segre and Simon Carnell are co-translators of three books by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, as well as of books by Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio van Straten, Antonio Erediatato and Paolo Cognetti. Their translations of Italian poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and in The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems. Erica Segre is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where she teaches Latin American Literature and Visual Art. Simon Carnell is the author of Hare.

Sara Teardo is a lecturer at the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University and holds a PhD from Rutgers University. She has published on Italian women writers and translation. In 2013, in collaboration with Princeton colleague Susan Stewart, she edited and translated Laudomia Bonanni’s posthumous novel The Reprisal (Chicago University Press).