One of Italy’s finest postwar writers. . . . If Elena Ferrante is a master of the sprawling, unputdownable epic, Ginzburg is a miniaturist. Her themes are buried in gestures, fragments, absences—not in what is said, but in what is not said. . . . Her masterpiece—the hyperbole is warranted—is Family Lexicon.”—Negar Azimi, Bookforum Cynthia Zarin (2020). Introduction. Valentino and Sagittarius. By Ginzburg, Natalia. New York: New York Review Books. pp.vii–xi. ISBN 9781681374741. Or, as Natalia Ginzburg puts it in her essay “Silence,” and as the global Covid-19 pandemic has shown, “Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.” There is no one quite like Natalia Ginzburg for telling it like it is. Her unique, immediately recognizable voice is at once clear and shaded, artless and sly, able to speak of the deepest sorrows and smallest pleasures of everyday life. For all those like myself who love Natalia Ginzburg’s prose, this generous selection assembled from her essay collections will be irresistible, a must to own, cherish and re-read.” –Phillip Lopate

A friend in Italy sent me a copy of Famiglia when it appeared in 1977. I translated the book for practice. By that time, my Italian was much improved through the courses I had taken for the graduate program that I never completed. Translating it was one of the happiest experiences of my writing life; I almost felt as though I were writing it, as if I were the person with that lucid, witty, and heartbreaking voice. NYRB: Jhumpa Lahiri & Cynthia Zarin discuss Natalia Ginzburg's Valentino & Sagittarius". Community Bookstore. 2020-08-13 . Retrieved 2020-10-29.

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Forging the Female Voice Out of the Ruins of History: Reading Natalia Ginzburg” by Katrin Wehling-Giorgi Part I, “The Examined Life: Natalia Ginzburg’s Life and Works,” outlines the framework for approaching Ginzburg’s biography and literary production. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s preface to her translation of Ginzburg’s collection of essays A Place to Live presents Ginzburg the essayist . The contributions that follow—by Andrew Martino and Chloe Garcia Roberts—dwell on Ginzburg’s essays and the lessons they teach us. Jeanne Bonner discusses the paradoxes of Ginzburg’s narratives and their representation of loneliness and loss. Concluding this part are two significant pieces: an excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s recent biography of Natalia Ginzburg, La corsara, in Minna Zallman Proctor’s translation—an excerpt that depicts Natalia’s life around the time she met and married Leone; and an interview with Sandra Petrignani herself. Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in incarceration in 1944 after suffering severe torture. [5] a b c Castronuovo, Nadia (2010), Natalia Ginzburg: Jewishness as Moral Identity, Troubador Publishing UK, ISBN 978-1-84876-396-8

Nearly all had missing teeth: the women down there lose their teeth at thirty, from hard work and poor nutrition as well as from the strains of childbirth and nursing babies that come one after the other relentlessly. (36)Human Relations: an essay on our relation to our world and its people as we grow from child to adult "knowing so well how the long chain of human relations takes its course, making its long navigable parable, the whole long road we have to travel to feel, at last, a bit of compassion." (1953) In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. [4] Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian.

There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is. Her unique, immediately recognizable voice is at once clear and shaded, artless and sly, able to speak of the deepest sorrows and smallest pleasures of everyday life.”—Phillip Lopate On Female Genius: A Conversation with Italian Writer and Ginzburg Biographer Sandra Petrignani,” translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova and Serena Todesco After her marriage, she used the name "Natalia Ginzburg" (occasionally spelled " Ginzberg") on most subsequent publications. Her first novel was published under the pseudonym "Alessandra Tornimparte" in 1942, during Fascist Italy's most anti-Semitic period, when Jews were banned from publishing. So why doesn’t this story have the emotional richness of Family? Unlike Carmine, a tangled, tormented character, Ilaria’s emotional life is hollow: that is the essence of her tale, the reason why a friend suggests she get a cat. But her hollowness can’t carry the weight of the narrative as Carmine’s complexity does. The surrounding characters, while never dull, do not work their way into the heart. Compared to Family, Borghesia seems something Ginzburg might have tossed off as a companion piece. Even the humor is broader and lighter than in Family. 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.” – BooklistEven though she condemns us all to join her, “Our fate spends itself in this succession of hope and nostalgia.” (40), I can’t help rereading, hoping, hopelessly, that she has hidden an answer in the essay, a way to avoid her fate. Arguably one of Italy's greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer's writer, quietly loved by her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg's books written over the course of a lifetime, was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Selected from Le piccole virt, Mai devi domandarmi, and Vita immaginaria, here are autobiographical essays about the life of a writer, motherhood, the hardship of the years immediately following World War II in Italy, and also on searching for an apartment, and starting a new job. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself. Paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability. This wonderful book is a selection of essays from four previously published books of Natalia Ginsburg (1916-1991), translated from the Italian by Lynn Sharon Schwartz. The end of winter awakened a vague restlessness in us. Maybe someone would come to visit, maybe something would finally happen. Surely our exile, too, must have an end. The roads cutting us off from the world seemed shorter, the mail came more often. All our chilblains slowly healed.

Reading Natalia Ginzburg” introduces the general reader to Ginzburg’s life and writing; it explores the texts, voices, bodies, and spaces that define her style and subject matter; and highlights the work of her translators. It constructs an accessible scaffolding with multiple points of view and multiple points of entry. The Light of Turin: Natalia Ginzburg’s Cityscape” by Roberto Carretta, translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova

Ginzburg spent much of the 1940s working for the publisher Einaudi in Turin in addition to her creative writing. They published some of the leading figures of postwar Italy, including Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. Ginzburg's second novel was published in 1947. A glowing light of modern Italian literature … Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning stroke of a plain phrase … As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.” – New York Times