Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision. Some of her most acclaimed work is set there. Her American characters encounter but never quite wholly adjust to the mysteries of the Italian mores. Collected here in one volume are Spencer's six Italian tales. Their plots are so alluring and enigmatic that Boccaccio would have been charmed by their delightful ironies and their sinister contrasts of dark and light. Spencer is grounded in two bases—Italy and the American South. Her characters too, mostly southerners, rove in search of connection and fulfillment. In The Light in the Piazza (a novella which has become both Spencer's signature piece and a Hollywood film) a stranger from North Carolina, traveling with her beautiful daughter, encounters the intoxicating beauty of sunlit Florence and discovers a deep conflict in the moral dilemma it presents. “I think this work has great charm,” Spencer has said, “and it probably is the real thing, a work written under great compulsion, while I was under the spell of Italy. But it took me, all told, about a month to write.” In Knights and Dragons (another novella and a companion piece to The Light in the Piazza) an American woman in Rome and Venice struggles for release from her husband's sinister control over her. Spencer sets this tale in the cold and wintry dark and here portrays the other face of Italy. In “The Cousins,” “The Pincian Gate,” “The White Azalea,” and “The Visit,” Spencer shows the exceptional artistry that has merited acclaim for her as one of America's first-class writers of the short story. The Light in the Piazza may long be the work for which she is most recognized. In 2005, the Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York City staged a musical adaptation of this novella. The production brought together the talents of Adam Guettel (music and lyrics) and Craig Lucas (book), while director Bartlett Sher made his Lincoln Center debut. That year the musical won six of the eleven Tony awards it was nominated for. It was thereafter produced on stages across the globe and eventually returned to Lincoln Center in 2016 for a reunion of its original cast as a benefit concert.

Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision. Some of her most acclaimed work is set there. Her American characters encounter but never quite wholly adjust to the mysteries of the Italian mores. Collected here in one volume are Spencer's six Italian tales. Their plots are so alluring and enigmatic that Boccaccio would have been charmed by their delightful ironies and their sinister contrasts of dark and light. Spencer is grounded in two bases—Italy and the American South. Her characters too, mostly southerners, rove in search of connection and fulfillment. In The Light in the Piazza (a novella which has become both Spencer's signature piece and a Hollywood film) a stranger from North Carolina, traveling with her beautiful daughter, encounters the intoxicating beauty of sunlit Florence and discovers a deep conflict in the moral dilemma it presents. “I think this work has great charm,” Spencer has said, “and it probably is the real thing, a work written under great compulsion, while I was under the spell of Italy. But it took me, all told, about a month to write.” In Knights and Dragons (another novella and a companion piece to The Light in the Piazza) an American woman in Rome and Venice struggles for release from her husband's sinister control over her. Spencer sets this tale in the cold and wintry dark and here portrays the other face of Italy. In “The Cousins,” “The Pincian Gate,” “The White Azalea,” and “The Visit,” Spencer shows the exceptional artistry that has merited acclaim for her as one of America's first-class writers of the short story. The Light in the Piazza may long be the work for which she is most recognized. In 2005, the Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York City staged a musical adaptation of this novella. The production brought together the talents of Adam Guettel (music and lyrics) and Craig Lucas (book), while director Bartlett Sher made his Lincoln Center debut. That year the musical won six of the eleven Tony awards it was nominated for. It was thereafter produced on stages across the globe and eventually returned to Lincoln Center in 2016 for a reunion of its original cast as a benefit concert.

A collection of six Italian tales in which her American characters encounter and respond to the mysteries of Italian mores.

The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author (Publishers Weekly). Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building’s elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. With language as colorful as the neighborhood it describes, each character takes his or her turn “giving evidence.” Their various stories reveal much about the drama of racial identity and the anxieties of a life spent on society’s margins, but also bring to life the hilarious imbroglios of this melting pot Italian culture. “Their frequently wild testimony teases out intriguing psychological and social insight alongside a playful whodunit plot.” —Publishers Weekly

On her centennial, a contemporary of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee joins the Library of America with a volume that restores to print her searing novel about the late Jim Crow South Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was a major figure of the Southern Renaissance, though today her many books and stories are scattered or out of print. This Library of America volume brings together the very best of her writing--three novels and nineteen stories--from a career spanning more than six decades. The Voice at the Back Door (1957), greeted by The New Yorker as "a practically perfect novel" and here restored to print, portrays small-town life in Mississippi during the late Jim Crow era and the self-interest and hatred that kept injustice firmly in place. Published two years after the Emmett Till lynching, it captures the spitting vehemence of its white characters' speech and may have been proven too potentially controversial for the Pulitzer board (which awarded no prize in 1957). Also included in this volume are The Light in the Piazza (1960), Spencer's most famous work, a deftly poignant comedy about Americans abroad that was adapted to the screen by Guy Green; and a second superb Italian novella, Knights and Dragons (1965), reminiscent of Henry James's novels in its atmosphere, interiority, and concern with transplanted Americans. Spencer excelled in the short story form and this volume presents a career-spanning selection by editor Michael Gorra that ranges from the early "First Dark" (1959), a kind of ghost story about a spectral oversized house in a Southern town, to the valedictory "The Wedding Visitor" (2013), about the refusal to let the all-enveloping world of place, family, and childhood define one's adult life. Spencer's special focus was families, and few writers have so brilliantly plumbed the passions that unite them and the inner upheavals that can tear them apart.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year: A deliciously entertaining account of expatriate life in a small village just outside Verona, Italy. Tim Parks is anything but a gentleman in Verona. So after ten years of living with his Italian wife, Rita, in a typical provincial Italian neighborhood, the novelist found that he had inadvertently collected a gallery full of splendid characters. In this wittily observed account, Parks introduces readers to his home town, with a statue of the Virgin at one end of the street, a derelict bottle factory at the other, and a wealth of exotic flora and fauna in between. Via Colombare, the village’s main street, offers an exemplary hodgepodge of all that is new and old in the bel paese, a point of collision between invading suburbia and diehard peasant tradition. It is a world of creeping vines, stuccoed walls, shotguns, security cameras, hypochondria, and expensive sports cars. More than a mere travelogue, Italian Neighbors is a vivid portrait of the real Italy and a compelling story of how even the most foreign people and places gradually assume the familiarity of home. “One of the most delightful travelogues imaginable . . . so vivid, so packed with delectable details.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

The twelve-time All-Star catcher describes the inspiration he gleaned from his self-made father, his early career with the Dodgers, his memorable 2000 World Series with the Mets, and the controversies that have marked his career.