Little Novels of Sicily

By Giovanni Verga

Book Overview

AVAILABLE AGAIN: a highly anticipated new edition of 12 poetically ironic short stories of 19th-century Sicily by a realist master, translated and introduced by D.H. Lawrence.

"Intoxicating... His finest work... How acutely Verga understood the tragic contradictions that still disturb our modern experience." --New York Review of Books

First published in a single volume in 1883, the 12 stories collected in this beautiful new paperback edition are drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood, reported at the time to be the poorest place in Europe. Verga's style is swift, sure, and implacable; he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath, and tells them with a stark economy of words. There's something dark and tightly coiled at the heart of each story, an ironic, bitter resolution that is belied by the deceptive simplicity of Verga's prose, and Verga strikes just when the reader's not expecting it.

Translator D. H. Lawrence surely found echoes of his own upbringing in Verga's sketches of Sicilian life: the class struggle between property owners and tenants, the relationship between men and the land, and the unsentimental, sometimes startlingly lyric evocation of the landscape.

Just as Lawrence veers between loving and despising the industrial North and its people, so too Verga shifts between affection for and ironic detachment from the superstitious, uneducated, downtrodden working poor of Sicily. If Verga reserves pity for anyone or anything, it is the children and the animals, but he doesn't spare them. In his experience, it is the innocents who suffer first and last and always.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1782697071
• ISBN13: 9781782697077
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Very nice

The perfect book for the avid reader, these are well written and enjoyable. These tales bring a flavor of life to the reader that is rare in writing today.

The real Sicily

I am doing historical research on Italy and Sicily and this book gives a wonderful view into the lives of ordinary people of the Sicilian countryside. Very frank accounts that are not sugar-coated.

Great Libretto

This is a wonderful little collection of short stories by the Sicilian author Giovanni Verga. I had never read any Sicilian literature before Verga, and I'm so glad that I started with this book! It has further piqued my interest in Sicilian culture and the Sicilian language. Verga uses his words very carefully in order to paint the pictures of the sorrows, joys, sufferings and moments of rejoicing in eastern Sicily. This is definitely worth the money for anyone who is interesed in Sicilian or Italian literature.

The whole world is a small town

The whole world is a small town is a sicilian phrase that means no matter where you travel, people will be basically the same. Reading this work by G. Verga gave this saying a whole new meaning for me. I learned that people in Sicily are basically the same today as they were 120 years ago. Giovanni Verga was born and lived in a small town in Sicily called Vizzini. This is the same town that my parents are from. I have spent many summers with my grandmother there. The distant past was always portrayed as somehow better by my grandmother. According to her, our ancestors did not succomb to petty human weaknesses. After enjoying these short stories I realize that my grandmother remembered her youth more with nostalgic fantasy than historic accuracy. This work wonderfully portrays human motivations, strenghts and weaknesses. It was a wonderful revelation to realize that the whole world is a small town, not only in the dimension of space but also in the dimension of time.