This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

First Published in a single volume in 1883, the stories collected in Little Novels of Sicily are drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood, reported at the time to be the poorest place in Europe. Verga's style is swift, sure, and implacable; he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath, and tells them with a stark economy of words. There's something dark and tightly coiled at the heart of each story, an ironic, bitter resolution that is belied by the deceptive simplicity of Verga's prose, and Verga strikes just when the reader's not expecting it. Translator D. H. Lawrence surely found echoes of his own upbringing in Verga's sketches of Sicilian life: the class struggle between property owners and tenants, the relationship between men and the land, and the unsentimental, sometimes startlingly lyric evocation of the landscape. Just as Lawrence veers between loving and despising the industrial North and its people, so too Verga shifts between affection for and ironic detachment from the superstitious, uneducated, downtrodden working poor of Sicily. If Verga reserves pity for anyone or anything, it is the children and the animals, but he doesn't spare them. In his experience, it is the innocents who suffer first and last and always.

"Giovanni Verga is one of the masters of European literature, and his novel The House by the Medlar Tree is a great work. I am very happy to see it reprinted and I hope that many people will read it."--Iriving Howe

Outstanding selection of tales include the celebrated "Cavalleria Rusticana" (Rustic Chivalry), "Nedda," "L'amante di Gramigna" (Gramigna's Mistress), "Reverie," "Jeli the Herdsman," "Nasty Redhead," and 6 others. Introduction. Notes.

"The fact that Verga's most rebellious heroines die violently at the hands of men has led to accusations of misogyny or, at the very least, of excessive social and artistic conventionality. Yet it is precisely Verga's awareness of convention that enriches his portrayal of women. The reaction of his female characters to social custom at a particular moment in their lives defines them as individuals. With rare insight, Verga depicts the female experience as both personal and universal, showing that different kinds of women are linked by the experience of being female in a male-centered culture. At the same time, however, he reveals the isolation in which women grow and live, separated from men and other women by social and cultural barriers."--BOOK JACKET.