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A new translation of the greatest Italian short-story writer since Boccaccio.

Born into a well-to-do Sicilian family, Giovanni Verga became an active observer of Milanese salon society in the 1870s and 1880s but eventually found in the everyday lives of Sicilian peasants the inspiration for his finest narratives. Love, adultery, and honor are recurring themes in the stories collected here, set against the scorched landscapes of the slopes of Mount Etna and the Plain of Catania.

Verga's rich naturalism and originality of style are faithfully rendered in G. H. McWilliam's superb translations. In addition to the title story, the basis for Pietro Mascagni's operatic masterpiece, this volume includes "Nedda," the groundbreaking narrative of Italian verismo, as well as "Jeli the Shepherd" and "Rosso Malpelo," which D. H. Lawrence considered two of the finest stories ever written.

Translated with an Introduction by G. H. McWilliam

"The landscape will be more or less familiar to anyone who has gone in the train down the east coast of Sicily. . . . And anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it, nor can he fail to fall under the spell of Verga's wonderful creation of it."-- D. H. Lawrence