The web of connections between private and public life, between the intellectual and the emotional and the political, is delicately visible, only occasionally breaking the surface.

— Harper's Magazine
Portrait of Natalia GinzburgCredit: Archivio Storico Einaudi

Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), “who authored twelve books and two plays; who, because of anti-Semitic laws, sometimes couldn’t publish under her own name; who raised five children and lost her husband to Fascist torture; who was elected to the Italian parliament as an independent in her late sixties—this woman does not take her present conditions as a given. She asks us to fight back against them, to be brave and resolute. She instructs us to ask for better, for ourselves and for our children” (Belle Boggs, The New Yorker).

“Ginzburg is a unique voice and there’s a direct simplicity to her prose that makes her dry observations all the more riveting” (Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian)

cover image of the book The Road to the City

The Road to the City

by Natalia Ginzburg

Translated by Gini Alhadeff

With a contribution by Cecily Brown

An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion. She’s in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister’s unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then “marries up,” but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg’s very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. “I think it might be her best book,” her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: “And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.”

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cover image of the book Voices in the Evening

Voices in the Evening

by Natalia Ginzburg

Translated by D.M. Low

With a contribution by Colm Tóibín

After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel’s narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town’s history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: “Why has everything been ruined?”

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cover image of the book Happiness, as Such

Happiness, as Such

by Natalia Ginzburg

Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor

At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence—an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink—created by a family’s only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes, missing him; so does Mara, his former lover, telling him about the birth of her son who may be his own. Left to clean up Michele’s mess, his family and friends complain, commiserate, tease, and grieve, struggling valiantly with the small and large calamities of their interconnected lives.

Natalia Ginzburg’s most beloved book in Italy and one of her finest achievements, Happiness, as Such is an original, wise, raw, comic novel that cuts to the bone.

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cover image of the book The Dry Heart

The Dry Heart

by Natalia Ginzburg

Translated by Frances Frenaye

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

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The web of connections between private and public life, between the intellectual and the emotional and the political, is delicately visible, only occasionally breaking the surface.

— Harper's Magazine

The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original.

— Rachel Cusk

The concepts, emotions and characters in her books are complex and unforgettable.

— Laurie Anderson, New York Times

Sharp and lively.

— Lydia Davis

Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her.

— Zadie Smith

Her simplicity is an achievement, hard-won and remarkable, and the more welcome in a literary world where the cloak of omniscience is all too readily donned.

— William Weaver, The New York Times

There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is.

— Phillip Lopate

I’m utterly entranced by Ginzburg’s style – her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.

— Maggie Nelson

Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling – that’s not so easy to do.

— Deborah Levy

If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.

— Laura Feigel, The Guardian

Ginzburg’s beautiful words have such solidity and simplicity. I read her with joy and amazement.

— Tessa Hadley

…the most popular of Ginzburg’s novels, and it’s easy to see why as the author explores the bonds holding a family together with blunt pragmatism but great warmth and humour.

— Ginzburg, Happiness As Such, The Herald

This deeply moving novel is a masterpiece.

— Book Riot

Natalia Ginzburg never fails to dazzle, and Happiness, as Such is another triumphant novel.

— The Irish Times

Ginzburg is a unique voice and there’s a direct simplicity to her prose that makes her dry observations all the more riveting

— Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian

Happiness, as Such, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, is from 1973, by which point Ginzburg had mastered her method and was complementing the sharp, glittering edifice of her prose with buried seams of humor and pathos.

— The Wall Street Journal

Ginzburg modernizes the form…Between generational differences, genealogical secrets, former and secret lovers, and the desires and limitations related to real and aspirational social milieux, Ginzburg seems to suggest that in the sphere of the family there is always more to tell, and differently.

— Los Angeles Review of Books

What impels her forward is the voice: free, pellucid, almost always first-person, interested not in the long view but in the here and now.

— The New Republic

Where it shines is at the line level, where Ginzburg and Proctor together often strike perfect notes.

— Chicago Review of Books

She is an original, no doubt, and partly by virtue of her sharpness, the peculiarly direct and needlelike precision of her prose.

— Jean McGarry

It’s good to have The Dry Heart back.

— The New Yorker

A wonderful act of virtuosity.

— The New Yorker

A deliciously arid novel.

— Interview Magazine

Candor and lies, love and exasperation, farce and inconsolable grief are seamlessly compounded in this very funny and deeply melancholy book. After devastating loss, which is to be feared more greatly—that nothing will ever be the same, or that many things will be more or less the same? Life goes on, all too recognizably. “You can get used to anything when there’s nothing else left,” says one of the characters toward the end.

— The New York Book Review

Her observations are swift and exact, usually irradiated by an unruly and often satirical humor. The instrument with which she writes is fine, wonderfully flexible and keen, and the quality of her attention is singular. The voice is pure and unmannered, both entrancing and alarming, elegantly streamlined by the authority of a powerful intelligence.

— The New York Review of Books

Where does style come from? Is it knowingly constructed or unconsciously secreted? Invented or inherited? These questions dog me whenever I read Ginzburg, whose thumbprint is so unmistakable, so inscribed by her time, yet whose work stands so solidly that it requires no background information to appreciate.

— New York Times

Ginzburg writes with humor and pathos. Epistolary, family exposes each to the other and we soon recognize that happiness is defined as mundane visitations, daily routines, and reactivated memory of joy as seen through loss.

— Lucy Kogler, Lit Hub

Natalia Ginzburg is a fierce writer. She trusts in things—in the few objects that can capture the emptiness of the universe.

— Italo Calvino

Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her.

— Zadie Smith

Her voice was distinctive from the start: cold in its exposure of false sentiment while warmly attentive to the details of family life and female experience.

— The Guardian
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