Family Sayings (Original title Lessico famigliare) is a novel by the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, first published in 1963. The book, which has also been published in English under the titles The Things We Used to Say and Family Lexicon, is a semi-biographical description of aspects of the daily life of her family, dominated by her father, the renowned histologist, Giuseppe Levi. The book is both an ironic and affectionate chronicle of life in the period 1920-1950, portrayed in terms of habits, behavior and, above all, linguistic communications, from which the book takes its title. People and events are brought to life by what they do and what they say. In addition to family members, including her mother, father, brothers and sisters the book also describes many friends and acquaintances.
The book covers the period of fascism in Italy and the early post-war years. It describes the death in custody of her husband Leone Ginzburg, a noted anti-fascist, and the persecution of the Jews in Italy during the period of Benito Mussolini. It ends with the suicide of the writer Cesare Pavese in 1950 and disillusionment at the failure to achieve the aims of the war-time resistance movement.
The novel won the Strega Prize in 1963.
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Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
Primo Michele Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
We the Living is the debut novel of the Russian American novelist Ayn Rand. It is a story of life in post-revolutionary Russia and was Rand's first statement against communism. Rand observes in the foreword that We the Living was the closest she would ever come to writing an autobiography. Rand finished writing the novel in 1934, but it was rejected by several publishers before being released by Macmillan Publishing in 1936. It has since sold more than three million copies.
James Howell was a Welsh writer and historian. The son of a Welsh clergyman, he was for much of his life in the shadow of his elder brother Thomas Howell, who became Lord Bishop of Bristol.
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation, he took a job in Stalino in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels.
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He became known in the West as the author of The Burn and of Generations of Winter, a family saga following three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.
Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich, was a Russian writer and former Soviet dissident, and the "first genuine comic writer" produced by the Soviet system. Among his most well-known works are the satirical epic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and the dystopian Moscow 2042. He was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship by Soviet authorities in 1980 but later rehabilitated and moved back to Moscow in 1990. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he continued to be an outspoken critic of Russian politics under the rule of Vladimir Putin.
Carlo Ginzburg is an Italian historian and a proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi, which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.
Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, literary critic, and essayist. He is often referred to as one of the most influential Italian writers of his time.
Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Leone Ginzburg was an Italian editor, writer, journalist and teacher, as well as an important anti-fascist political activist and a hero of the resistance movement. He was the husband of the renowned author Natalia Ginzburg and the father of the historian Carlo Ginzburg.
The Strega Prize is the most important Italian literary award. It has been awarded annually since 1947 for the best work of prose fiction written in the Italian language by an author of any nationality and first published between 1 March of the previous year and 28/29 February.
Jean Patrick Modiano, generally known as Patrick Modiano, is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction.
Luisa Ferida, real surname Manfrini, was an Italian stage and film actress. She was one of divas in Italian cinema during decade 1935–1945 and she was the highest paid movie star of that period. The actress was famous as a films diva and she is remembered for her tragic death; in fact during the period of anti-fascist vendettas, immediately after Italian Civil War, she was assassinated, as was later proved by the Milan Court of Appeal, by shooting following a summary trial carried out by some partisans: she was shot with her lover, the actor and member of Decima Flottiglia MAS Osvaldo Valenti, as accused of alleged and hypothetical participation in war crimes and torture in connection with so-called Koch gang, facts of which she was then deemed innocent after the war. Therefore a war pension was allocated to the mother, who had no other source of income.
Marlen Haushofer was an Austrian author, most famous for her novel The Wall (1963).
Mary Edith Scott was a New Zealand novelist, teacher and librarian. She was a prolific writer who specialised in romantic comedies set in rural New Zealand, and her books were widely read both in New Zealand and overseas. From 1953 to 1978 she wrote at a rate of at least one book per year. She published over thirty novels, five detective novels written jointly with Joyce West, an autobiography, and three collections of plays.
Giuseppe Levi was an Italian anatomist and histologist, professor of human anatomy at the universities of Sassari, Palermo and Turin. He was born on 14 October 1872 in Trieste to Jewish parents, Michele Levi and Emma Perugia. He was married to Lidia Tanzi and had five children: Gino, Mario, Alberto, Paola, and writer Natalia Ginzburg, who described her father's personality in the successful Italian book Lessico famigliare (1963).
Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee that was published in 2015 by HarperCollins (US) and Heinemann (UK). Written before her only other published novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Go Set a Watchman was initially promoted as a sequel by its publishers. It is now accepted that it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with many passages in that book being used again.
Drusilla Tanzi was an Italian writer who was born and died in Milan.
The Artamonov Business, also translated as The Artamonovs or Decadence, is a novel by Maxim Gorky written during his 10-year emigration from Soviet Russia. It was published in Berlin in 1925 by Verlag "Kniga". Critics often call it Gorky's best novel, or best after The Life of Klim Samgin.
