Behind Closed Doors: Her Father's House and Other Stories of Sicily

The Sicilian writer Maria Messina’s captivating and brutal stories of the women of her home island are presented in a “lyrical and immediate” English translation by Elise Magistro (Publishers Weekly).

Messina, who died in 1944, was the foremost female practitioner of verismo—the Italian literary realism pioneered by fellow Sicilian Giovanni Verga. Published between 1908 and 1928, Messina’s fiction represents the massive Si...