Lies and Sorcery - Paperback

by Elsa Morante (Author), Jenny McPhee (Translator)

An Italian master's magnum opus about three generations of women, now in the first-ever unabridged English translation.

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.

Author Biography

Elsa Morante (1912-1985) was an Italian novelist, poet, and translator. She was born in Rome and lived there nearly all her life. In 1941, she published her first collection of stories and married the novelist Alberto Moravia. Morante is best known for her novels Arturo's Island and La Storia. For her work, she was awarded both the Viareggio Prize and the Strega Prize.

Jenny McPhee is a translator and the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. For NYRB Classics she translted Curzio Malaparte's The Kremlin Ball and Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon. She is the director for the Center of Applied Liberal Arts at New York University.