Giovanni Verga

In his masterpiece “I Malavoglia”, Giovanni Verga tells the story of an unlucky family of fishermans from Sicily.

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck

"Mastro-don Gesualdo is the epic of the economic compulsion that relentlessly drives a man toward the acquisition of great wealth and the power that such wealth generates."--Page x.

A mother, a daughter and their lover hurtle towards tragedy in Verga's passionate Italian drama, first performed in 1894. This new translation premieres at the RSC in June 2000

This is the first English translation of Verga's novel La Storia di una Capinera and is the official tie-in with the Zeffirelli film Sparrow. Set in 1854 in a Sicily devastated by a cholera epidemic. Sparrow tells of a love that can never be; the brief existence of a girl, forced to become a nun, who falls in love with a young man, but who, on returning to the convent, goes insane. Zeffirelli chose to film Sparrow as he was intrigued by the need for idealised and absolute love. "It is a challenge for me to tell of 'The Insanity of Absolute Love' with its emotional yearnings and enchantment, its exchanges of furtive glances and stolen caresses".