Winner of the 2024 Society of Authors John Florio Prize for for the best translation from Italian and the 2024 American Literary Translator Association's Italian Prose in Translation Prize

Elsa Morante is one of the titans of twentieth-century literature--Natalia Ginzburg said she was the writer of her own generation that she most admired--and yet her work remains little known in the United States. Written during World War II, Morante's celebrated first novel, Lies and Sorcery, is in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust, spanning the lives of three generations of wildly eccentric women.

The story is set in Sicily and told by Elisa, orphaned young and raised by a fallen woman. For years Elisa has lived in an imaginary world of her own; now, however, her guardian has died, and the young woman feels that she must abandon her fantasy life to confront the truth of her family's tortured and dramatic history. Elisa is a seductive, if less than reliable, spinner of stories, and the reader is drawn into a tale of secrets, intrigue, and treachery, which, as it proceeds, is increasingly revealed to be an exploration of a legacy of political and social injustice. Throughout, Morante's elegant writing--and her drive to get at the heart of her characters' complex relationships and all-too self-destructive behavior--holds us spellbound.

Elsa Morante's novels were once considered the greatest of Italy's postwar generation. Here, Ann Goldstein's deft translation (Madeline Schwartz, New York Review of Books) of Arturo's Island heralds a second life for the beloved author, finally garnering Morante the new readers she deserves (Lily Tuck, Wall Street Journal). Imbued with a spectral grace, the novel follows the adolescent Arturo through his days on the isolated Neapolitan island of Procida, where--his mother long deceased, his father often absent, and a dog as his sole companion--he roams the countryside or reads in his family's lonely, dilapidated mansion. This quiet, meandering boyhood existence is existentially upended when his father brings home a beautiful sixteen- year- old bride, Nunziatella. A novel of thwarted desires, written with the power of malediction (Dwight Garner, New York Times), Arturo's Island reemerges to take its rightful place in the world literary canon.

The first time I read Aracoeli, I found it almost pointlessly disturbing and shocking. On rereading it, I still found it disturbing and shocking, but I have also grown to admire it--perhaps because it is so dark and resists any attempt to classify it. In writing this novel, Morante may have knowingly sacrificed clarity and logic in order to express her vision of a chaotic world. (Lily Tuck, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante)

Aracoeli--Elsa Morante's final novel--is the story of an aging man's attempt to recover the past and get his life on track in the process. The Aracoeli of the title is the narrator's deceased mother, who grew up in a small Spanish town before marrying an upper-class Italian navy ensign. The idyllic years she spends with her only son--Manuel, the narrator of the novel--are shattered when she contracts an incurable disease (probably syphilis) and becomes a nymphomaniac.

Now, at the age of 43, Manuel, an unattractive, self-loathing, recovering drug addict who works a dead-end job at a small publishing house, decides to travel to her hometown in Spain in order to look for her. Filled with dreams and remembrances the novel creates a Sebaldian landscape of memory out of this painful journey, painting a portrait that is both touching and bleak.

Appearing here for the first time in paperback--the hardcover was published in 1984--Aracoeli is an important, and long-neglected, work in Morante's oeuvre.

First published in Italian in 1968, The World Saved by Kids was written in the aftermath of deep personal change and in the context of what Elsa Morante called the great youth movement exploding against the funereal machinations of the organized contemporary world. Morante believed that it was only the youth who could truly hear her revolutionary call. With the fiftieth anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1968 approaching, there couldn't be a more timely moment for this first English translation of Morante's work to appear.

Greeted by Antonio Porta as one of the most important books of its decade, The World Saved by Kids showcases Morante's true mastery of tone, rhythm, and imagery as she works elegy, parody, storytelling, song, and more into an act of linguistic magic through which Gramsci and Rimbaud, Christ and Antigone, Mozart and Simone Weil, and a host of other figures join the sassy, vulnerable neighborhood kids in a renewal of the word's timeless, revolutionary power to explore and celebrate life's insoluble paradox.

Morante gained international recognition and critical acclaim for her novels History, Arturo's Island, and Aracoeli, and The World Saved By Kids may be her best book and the one that most closely represents her spirit.