A brilliant new translation of Elsa Morante’s classic Italian novel, ‘Lies and Sorcery”

+ Carmela Ciuraru’s newly published “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages” featuring Elsa Morante AND The Ciociaria area southeast of Rome + 2 LOCAL HOLIDAY RECIPES 🎄

Overlooking the Ciociaria hills from Anagni

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 - until now - has remained 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.

In 1948, Morante’s first novel, “House of Liars”, was published. Now Jenny McPhee’s new translation of this classic Italian novel, ‘Lies and Sorcery”, has finally gotten the translation it deserves.

The NYT review of Elsa Morante’s newly translated propulsive 1940s saga of women’s lives, “Lies and Sorcery,” brings its penetrating insight to a new generation.

“Elsa Morante published “Lies and Sorcery” in 1948, just when postwar literary Italy was embracing the modernist voices of writers like Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino and Morante’s own husband, Alberto Moravia. It received serious reviews and was a success across Europe. Although an abridged version appeared in America under the title “House of Liars,” the saga was never available in its entirety in English until now, thanks to the inspired translation by Jenny McPhee.