ONLY $9.90 DELIVERY INFO
Elsa Morante (Author) Elsa Morante was an Italian novelist, poet, and translator. She was born in 1912 in Rome and wrote her debut novel, Lies and Sorcery, while hiding in the countryside during the German occupation of Italy in the Second World War. Alongside Lies and Sorcery, which won the Viareggio Prize, Morante's novels include Arturo's Island, which was awarded the Strega Prize, and History- A Novel which became a national bestseller in Italy on publication. She died in 1985. Jenny McPhee (Translator) Jenny McPhee is a translator and the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. She is the director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts at New York University and lives in New York.
Thrillingly addictive, magnificent, luxurious . . . as staggering and absorbing as a great 19th-century novel -- Catherine Taylor * Telegraph * I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy... It was an extraordinary adventure for me to discover, among those chapter titles that felt so nineteenth-century, that the novel was actually describing our own time and place, our own daily existence with lacerating and painful intensity -- Natalia Ginzburg [In Lies and Sorcery] I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value -- Elena Ferrante Each plot development is surrounded by acres of commentary whose richness and intensity — deep, dense, psychologically penetrating — provides the story with transformative values, converts melodrama into metaphor * The New York Times * [Lies and Sorcery] is a work of wild abundance and inexhaustible psychological depth....[it] evokes the passage from a traditional society steeped in the values of collectiveness and belonging to one obsessed with power, with the idea that an individual need only impose their will to have what they want....Elsa Morante’s is, undeniably, a grim vision of the world; yet to read Lies and Sorcery in this heroic new translation by Jenny McPhee, always admirably attentive to the original’s delicate balance between archaism and fluency, is exhilarating throughout -- Tim Parks * TLS * A social epic tinged with fabulism and written in a sensual and highly ornate prose . . . a writer of conscience, and of brilliance besides -- Bailey Trela * The Washington Post * The finest Italian novel of modern times -- György Lukács Glittering ironies and brilliant, devastating turns of phrase . . . Morante’s audience had been shaped by the triple-deckers of 19th-century maestros like Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy and Manzoni. Her novel is a savage spoof of those masterpieces, an enormous work of literary disenchantment. . . a deliciously ornate translation by Jenny McPhee -- Sam Sacks * Wall Street Journal * Slippery, feverish, dreamlike . . . an enveloping tumult of a book . . . an invitation to contemplate stories (fictions? lies?) at the heart of a life . . . sorcery is everywhere, in certain objects, in memories, in the power of love or need or shame, and—most importantly—in the alchemy involved in conjuring something that ought to be true out of the shabby and unsatisfactory materials at hand . . . a potent enchantment prevailed, and for me, the book’s impassioned insistence became an unassailable and transporting reality -- Deborah Eisenberg * New York Review of Books * Worth the wait: This multigenerational Sicilian family saga may run to nearly 800 pages in Jenny McPhee’s fantastic new translation, but it’s so pleasurable that you’ll welcome the scope * New York Times Editor’s Choice *
