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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Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.
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).
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish 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), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, GE, known as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, was an Italian writer, nobleman, and the last Prince of Lampedusa. He is most famous for his only novel, Il Gattopardo, which is set in his native Sicily during the Risorgimento. A taciturn, solitary, shy, and somewhat misanthropic aristocrat, he opened up only with a few close friends and spent a great deal of his time reading and meditating. He said of himself as a child, "I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people," and in 1954 wrote, "Of my sixteen hours of daily wakefulness, at least ten are spent in solitude."
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.
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist.
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 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.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a novel by Milan Kundera, published in France in 1979. It is composed of seven separate narratives united by some common themes. The book considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics, and life in general. The stories also contain elements found in the genre of magic realism.
William Fense Weaver was an English language translator of modern Italian literature.
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 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 prestigious 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 May of the previous year and 30 April.
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.
