Elio Vittorini was born in Siracusa, Sicily in 1908. An acclaimed translator (Defoe, Faulkner, Lawrence, Steinbeck and Somerset Maugham) and broadcaster and activist all his life, it wasn't until 1941 that Conversations in Sicily first appeared. A highly outspoken critic of Mussolini and his fascist government,Vittorini was arrested and jailed in 1942. He died in 1966.

Superbly written ... Vittorini's unique prose laps against one in repetitious wavelets, alive to the rhythm and significance of language in a way more common to poetry than to prose.Praised in the past by writers like Ernest Hemingway and Italo Calvino, this new translation by Alane Mason restores a paint-fresh vividness to a classic novel, too-little known in the English speaking world.