What made a young Sardinian woman in the nineteenth century think that she could become a famous writer, especially considering the time and her position, her gender and lack of education? Yet Grazia Deledda achieved such status in the literary world that publishers in Italy vied for her fiction. Nearly seventy years after her death, her novels continue to be reprinted and translated, and critical appreciation of her work continues to grow. This - the first full length biography of Deledda in English for an adult audience - is the story of a woman who overcame obstacles that would discourage...

"Cosima" tells the story of an aspiring writer growing up in Nuoro, Sardinia during the last decades of the nineteenth century when formal education for women was rare and literary careers unheard-of. Based on Deleddas own life, the work describes a young womans struggle against the dismay and disapproval of her family and friends at her creative ambitions. Yet it also reads like a charming fable with details of family life, rural traditions and wild bandits, and it is as much a novel of memory as of character or action.

Deleddas characters are poor country folk driven by some predetermined...

Winner of the prestigious Viareggio Literary Prize in 1984, this work chronicles the solitary life of Tosca, who spends her senior years among the offspring of her dearly departed cat.

Fiction. Translated from the Italian by Martha King. "During a time of hunting down the im]migrant, it is good to read a book like Elena Gianini Belotti's THE BITTER TASTE OF STRANGERS' BREAD. It reminds us who we were in the early twentieth century, when our own emigrants were forced to earn their bread with the most menial and burdensome of work in an America that killed Sacco and Vanzetti.... On the cover there is a photo from 1915 that portrays an immigrant dressed up against a paper backdrop...sitting in a car and holding on to the steering wheel while staring disoriented into the...