Valentino and Sagittarius

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born Natalia Levi in Sicily, the daughter of a Jewish biologist father and a Catholic mother. She grew up in Turin, in a household that was a salon for antifascist activists, intellectuals, and artists, and published her first short stories at the age of eighteen; she would go on to become one of the most important and widely taught writers in Italy, taking up the themes of oppression, family, and social change. In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, a prominent writer, activist, and editor. In 1940, the fascist government exiled the Ginzburgs and their children to a remote village. After the fall of Mussolini, Leone fled to Rome, where he was arrested by Nazi authorities and tortured to death. Natalia married Gabriele Baldini, an English professor, in 1950, and spent the next three decades in Rome, London, and Turin, writing dozens of novels, plays, and essay. NYRB Classics is the publisher of her novel Family Lexicon and two novellas, Valentino and Sagittarius. Avril Bardoni (1936-2017) was a translator of opera libretti and literature, most notably from the Italian. Among the authors whose work she translated were Leonardo Sciascia, Susanna Tamaro, and Romana Petri. In 1986 she was awarded the John Florio Prize for the translation of a work of contemporary Italian literature into English for Sciascia's The Wine-Dark Sea (available as an NYRB Classic). Cynthia Zarin's books include The Ada Poems, Orbit, An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History, Two Cities, and several books for children. She teaches at Yale.