Publisher Description

"As for Naples, today I feel drawn above all by Anna Maria Ortese. . . . If I managed again to write about this city, I would try to craft a text that explores the direction indicated there."—Elena Ferrante in Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey"Anna Maria Ortese was the last great writer of the generation that produced Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Today, few critics would disagree with the poet Andrea Zanzotto, who rates her as 'one of the most important Italian women writers of this century.'"—The IndependentA riveting classic of European literature, this superb collection of short fiction and reportage is set in Italy's perhaps most vibrant and turbulent metropolis—Naples—in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. These writings helped inspire Elena Ferrante's best-selling novels and she has expressed deep admiration for the author of this volume, originally edited in Italian by Italo Calvino. Goyaesque in its depiction of the widespread suffering and brutal desperation that plagued the city, it comprises a mix of masterful story telling and piercing journalism. This book, with its unforgettable portrait of Naples high and low, is also a stunning literary companion to the great neorealist films of the era by directors such as Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Neapolitan Chronicles is exquisitely rendered in English by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee, two of the leading translators working from Italian today. Included in the collection is "A Pair of Eyeglasses," one of the most widely praised Italian short stories of the last century.Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) is one of the most celebrated and original Italian writers of the last century. Neapolitan Chronicles brought her widespread acclaim in her native country when it was first published in 1953 and won the prestigious Premio Viareggio.

Author Biography

Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) is one of the most celebrated and original Italian writers of the 20th century. Neapolitan Chronicles brought her widespread acclaim in her native country when it was first published in 1953 and won the prestigious Premio Viareggio.Ann Goldstein has translated The Neapolitan Novels and other works by Elena Ferrante, as well as writings by Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi and Pier Paolo Pasolini. She is the former head of the copy department at The New Yorker.Jenny McPhee has translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Paolo Maurensig and Pope John Paul II.

Review

"As for Naples, today I feel drawn above all by Anna Maria Ortese ... If I managed again to write about this city, I would try to craft a text that explores the direction indicated there."—Elena Ferrante in Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey"Anna Maria Ortese was the last great writer of the generation that produced Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Today, few critics would disagree with the poet Andrea Zanzotto, who rates her as 'one of the most important Italian women writers of this century.'"—The Independent"Gives an essential glimpse into the origins of Ferrante's work ... A mesmerizing companion to Ferrante's Neapolitan project as well as a daring work of both social criticism and narrative inventiveness that stands, toweringly, on its own."—Seraillon"An astonishing descent into the underworld … A modern artist has rarely rendered so intensely the spectrality of all things."—La Repubblica

Promotional

Readings at prominent venues by the translators Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee. Goldstein, who has been frequently interviewed in high profile publications about her translations of Elena Ferrante, and McPhee will speak and promote Anna Maria Ortese's work.Planned publication of an excerpt or a complete story from Neapolitan Chronicles in The New Yorker and other leading magazines.

Review Quote

"Required reading for Ferrante fans and scholars of Neapolitan literature." -- Kirkus Reviews "Anna Maria Ortese is a writer of exceptional prowess and force. The stories collected in this volume, which reverberate with Chekhovian energy and melancholy, are revered in Italy by writers and readers alike. Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee reward us with a fresh and scrupulous translation." -- Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowland and In Other Words "As for Naples, today I feel drawn above all by Anna Maria Ortese ... If I managed again to write about this city, I would try to craft a text that explores the direction indicated there." -- Elena Ferrante in Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey "Anna Maria Ortese's Neapolitan Chronicles is a mother lode, in every sense, for the work of Elena Ferrante. Ferrante drew inspiration from Ortese, not only for the characters, voices, and places in her great tetralogy, but for the power of the woman's voice that narrates them." -- Judith Thurman, author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette "This remarkable city portrait, both phantasmagorical and harshly realistic, conveys Naples in all its shabbiness and splendor. Naples appears as both a monster and an immense waiting room, whose inhabitants are caught between resignation and unquenchable resilience. Beautifully translated, this lyrical gem has been rescued from the vast storehouse of superior foreign literature previously ignored." -- Phillip Lopate, author of Bachelorhood and Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan "This beautiful book is a landmark in Italian literature and a major influence on Elena Ferrante--both as a way of writing about Naples and because Anna Maria Ortese may have been the model for the narrator of Ferrante's quartet of novels set there. Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee have rendered Ortese's lively, Neapolitan-inflected Italian in vivid, highly engaging English prose." -- Alexander Stille, author of The Sack of Rome and Benevolence and Betrayal "Naples is a vast succession of cities--Greek, Samnite, Roman, Byzantine, Aragonese, Spanish, Bourbon, Savoyard--and every phase has had its chronicler. In the aftermath of World War Two, battered, humiliated Naples found no abler witness than Anna Maria Ortese. Sixty-five years later, with international interest in Naples unexpectedly high, Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee have given us an essential, eloquent translation as faithful to Ortese's time as it is vividly alive for our own." -- Benjamin Taylor, author of Naples Declared and Tales Out of School "Anna Maria Ortese was the last great writer of the generation that produced Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Today, few critics would disagree with the poet Andrea Zanzotto, who rates her as 'one of the most important Italian women writers of this century.'" -- The Independent "Gives an essential glimpse into the origins of Ferrante's work ... A mesmerizing companion to Ferrante's Neapolitan project as well as a daring work of both social criticism and narrative inventiveness that stands, toweringly, on its own." -- Seraillon "An astonishing descent into the underworld ... A modern artist has rarely rendered so intensely the spectrality of all things." -- La Repubblica

Competing Titles

Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey Elena Ferrante 9781609452926 $24 Europa Editions 1-11-16 Girlfriends, Ghosts and Other Stories William Weaver 9781681370163 15.95 NYRB Classics 2016 Tolstoy, Rasputin and Me Teffi 9781590179963 14.95 NYRB Classics 2016

Excerpt from Book

Opening paragraphs from the story "The Gold of Forcella" The bus that was supposed to take me to the intersection of Via Duomo and Via San Biagio dei Librai was so crowded that it was impossible for me to get off at the right stop. When I finally did set my foot on the ground, I found myself staring at the Central Station''s dismal facade, along with the monument to Garibaldi, and a procession of faded green tramcars, rickety black taxis, and carriages drawn by small, sleepy horses. I turned and headed back the way I''d come until I reached Via Pietro Colletta, in the renowned Tribunali neighborhood. The sky was bright blue, as dazzling as on a postcard, and beneath that luminosity, amid buildings that rose here and there in no apparent order, like clouds, people came and went in a confused manner. At the beginning of Via Forcella, I stopped, somewhat perplexed. Farther up the street there was a great bustle, a wave of colors among which red and black stood out, and a buzz of mournful voices. A market, I thought, or a street fight. An old woman was sitting near a rock on a street corner and I stopped to ask her what all those people were doing. She raised her face, pitted by smallpox, and framed by a large black kerchief, and took a look for herself at that distant strip of sunlight at the heart of Forcella where the crowd was bulging like a snake, and the source of that intermittent mournful buzz. "No one''s doing nothing, signora ," she said calmly, in dialect, "you''re dreaming." It was years since I''d been down here, and I had forgotten that, along with Via San Biagio dei Librai, Via Forcella is one of the most densely populated streets in Naples, where the coming and going often gives one the sensation that something extraordinary must be happening. Through a veil of dust, the sun gave off a reddish glow that was no longer cheerful. From the thresholds of hundreds of small shops or from chairs set out along the sidewalks, women and children stared up at it with a strange, dazed air. Even the donkeys hitched to the vegetable carts seemed struck by the peculiar murkiness of the light, twitching their long ears in order to shoo the flies with a silent, apathetic patience. In a small pushcart, like those used by the sanitation authority, which seemed to have been momentarily abandoned in the middle of the street, a head could be seen; beneath it was the trunk of a man of about fifty, carefully dressed in a jacket buttoned to the neck and sewn at the sides and lower hemline like a sack. A small gilt plate tied to his chest with twine invited passers-by to give alms, but no one noticed him and, to tell the truth, not even he did much to attract the public''s pity. With his cheek, reddened by wine, resting against a sack, his ears also reddened, even glowing, from wine, his white hair cascading over his eyebrows, and a delicate smile on his parted lips, the citizen slept. All around him, meanwhile, dwarves of both sexes passed by, decorously dressed in black, with pale, distorted faces, large sorrowful eyes, and twig-like fingers held at their chests, careful to avoid colliding with children and dogs. Other beggars, cripples or simply professionals, were sprawled on the ground wearing images of this or that patron saint around their necks or holding signs listing their misfortunes and children--a sight that was replicated in the more fashionable streets of this city, in Chiaia or Piazza dei Martiri. They waited decorously, or dreamed. Several church bells rang out loudly, calling these souls to Mass. As I came out of Forcella onto Via Duomo, the traffic seemed more orderly and almost silent, but soon became even louder again in the San Biago dei Librai district, which could be described as a continuation of Forcella. Just like other ancient, impoverished streets in Naples, Via San Biagio dei Librai was packed with shops selling gold. Lackluster glass display cases, an excessively polished counter (so many ladies'' elbows and hands having leaned on it for probably more than a century), a bespectacled maggot of a man who cautiously balances a shiny object in his hand and silently observes it, while a woman, young or old, standing before him at the counter, eyes him anxiously. Another scene, even more intense: the trap now momentarily empty, the same maggot, coming out to the threshold of his shop as if taking a break, looks vaguely around him, eyeing, in turn, in the crowd, the approach of a pale, hungry face, the eyes full of shame. That carpet of flesh which, even as I entered San Biagio dei Librai, had appeared extremely dense to me, seemed to disappear the deeper in I went, or at least it wasn''t as extraordinary, much as a fresco when you move right up close to it. The fact remained that, as in Forcella, I had never before seen so many beings together, walking or hanging out, colliding and fleeing one another, greeting one another from their windows and calling out from the shops, bargaining over the price of goods, or yelling out a prayer, in the same sweet, broken, singers'' voices that had more of the tone of a lament than that of the vaunted Neapolitan cheer. It was truly something that both astonished and eclipsed all one''s thoughts. Most alarming was the number of children, a force sprung from the unconscious, who were not remotely supervised or fortunate, as could be observed from the black halo hanging over their heads. Every once in a while, like a rat, someone would emerge from a hole in the pavement, move a few steps out onto the sidewalk, and then scurry back in. The alleyways off this street, itself narrow and eroded, were even more narrow and eroded. I didn''t see the sheets for which Naples is well known, only the black hollows in which they were once hung: windows, doors, balconies where tin cans sprouted withered bits of lemon verbena. I felt compelled to search, behind the miserable window-panes, for walls, and furnishings and perhaps other little windows opening onto a flowering garden at the back of the house; but you saw nothing except a confused tangle of various items such as blankets or remains of baskets, vases, and chairs from on which, like a sacred image blackened by time, the yellow cheekbones of a woman stuck out, her eyes unmoving, thoughtful, her black hair pinned on top of her head, her stick-like arms folded in her lap. At the far end of the alley, like a Persian rug worn down to clumps and threads, lay fragments of a great variety of garbage, out of the middle of which issued forth the pale, swollen, or bizarrely thin figures of more children, with large shaved heads and soft eyes. Few were clothed, and those who were wore shirts that exposed their stomachs; almost all were barefoot or wore sandals from another era, held together with string. Some played with tin cans; others, lying on the ground, were intent on covering their faces with dust, still others seemed to be busy building a little altar with a stone and a saint, and there were those who, gracefully imitating a priest, turned to offer their blessing.

Description for Sales People

A compelling and accessible classic of 20th century literature, greatly admired by Elena Ferrante and sure to be devoured by her many fervent fans, vividly brought to life by two of the leading literary translators working today.

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