Natalia Ginzburg was born in Palermo, Italy in 1916. She 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. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside, or contemporary Rome—all the while approaching those traumas only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life. Arcade has published several of her works, including The Little Virtues, All Our Yesterdays, and The City and the House.
Tim Parks is the author of more than twenty novels and works of nonfiction, including Europa, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His essays have appeared regularly in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, for which he blogs. He lives in Italy.