Reeds in the Wind: Top 100 translations in Fiction, Compared to Lampedusa’s The Leopard

 

We’re thrilled to learn that our edition of Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda’s Reeds in the Wind, translated by Martha King (1998), has gotten some very good attention lately. 

First, Boyd Tonkin lists it at number 31 in his The 100 Best Novels in Translation (Cambridge: Galileo, 2018). Among his other authors are Cervantes, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Proust, Colette, Svevo, Mann, Nabakov, Duras, Camus, Yourcenar, Lampedusa, Fuentes, Kundera, Müller.... Here’s some of what he has to say about Reeds:

“Martha King captures Deledda’s human and natural landscape in all its bold colors: radiant and serene in one scene, rugged an violent in the next.… If you have never read Grazia Deledda’s Sardinian novel Reeds in the Wind, you will want to read it now.”

That story was picked up in The Times Literary Supplement (5 October 2018).

Then recently, there’s Nicholas Whyte in From the Heart of Europe (29 December 2025), who compares Reeds in the Wind to Lampedusa's The Leopard:

“Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926…for her idealistically inspired writings which, with plastic clarity, picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general.… Reeds in the Wind/Canne al vento, is her best known book.… It’s about a declining noble family in Sardinia, and the tension between the two surviving sisters, the son of the sister who fled to the mainland years before, and the old retainer who is the guardian of the dark family secret that is eventually revealed. It reminded me of The Leopard.”

The Theft (Il Furto) Reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly

The new Fall season opens with a fine review in Renaissance Quarterly (79.3, Fall 2026) of Francesco D'Ambra’s The Theft (Il Furto), edited by Vanni Bramanti, Linda L. Carroll, Anthony M. Cummings, and Alexander Dean. Sergio Costola has high praise for “an exceptional team of editors” who have produced “an impeccable translation” that “makes available, in an unprecedented way, the complete materials for a single festive theatrical event from the mid-sixteenth century.” Please have a look at this review.
 

Italica Press Catalog 64, Summer 2026

Our Italica Press Catalog 64, for Summer 2026, is now available and ready for download. It features five new and recently published titles, plus our complete backlist. This season offers a fine selection of medieval and Renaissance texts, historical geography and cosmology, studies in art and history, and modern Italian fiction and poetry.

New and recent titles include Songs of Castelvecchio, Giovanni Pascoli’s most important collection of verse; Gregorio Dati’s La Sfera / The Globe: Cosmology, Science, and Geography in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean; Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda’s The Mother; William Tronzo’s Four Mediterranean Capitals: Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, and Venice. Essays in Architecture and Visual Experience; and the next volume in our series of Italian Crime Writers, Grazia Verasani’s Nowhere Fast. Please have a look at our Catalog 64.

Pascoli’s Songs of Castelvecchio Published

We’re happy to announce the publication of Giovanni Pascoli’s Songs of Castelvecchio (Canti di Castelvecchio) in a new complete English translation by Elena Borelli and Stephen Campiglio.

Songs of Castelvecchio is an epic of the countryside and of humanity’s place among the cycle of seasons. Pascoli weaves into the Songs his own autobiographical experience of loss, trauma, and closure. Castelvecchio becomes a symbolic space where past and present coexist, where the poet revisits and relives such emotional moments.

Despite Songs of Castelvecchio’s powerful influence on Anglophone poetry, fewer than a third of the poems in this collection have ever appeared previously in English. Here, for the first time, we present a new translation of the complete work.

“One of the greatest poets of all times.” — Seamus Heaney

Songs of Castelvecchio is the third of Pascoli’s works published by Italica Press and is the newest title in our Poetry in Translation series.

Tronzo, Four Mediterranean Capitals Published

We are happy to announce the publication of William Tronzo's Four Mediterranean Capitals: Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, Venice. Essays in Architecture and Visual Experience.

Tronzo brings together insights into four major late ancient and medieval capitals — Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, and Venice — to uncover their common visual vocabulary of civic space, architecture, and symbolic meaning. Drawing on decades of his own and others’ previous research and publication, he offers new approaches into well-known urban contexts and architectural settings, delving into the viewer’s experience of mosaic, sculpture, drapery, revetment and stone, of wall, dome, and portal, of street and forum to reexamine how historic buildings helped shape the experience of the civic, the imperial, and the divine manifested in urban life and daily movement.

218 pages, 68 color and b&w images, introduction, notes, bibliography, index.

A new title in Italica’s Studies in Art & History series.

 

Mediaevistik Review and Publishers’ Note

We call readers’ attention to a new review by Prof. Albrecht Classen of C. Stephen Jaeger’s Medieval Humanism: Collected Essays that has just been published in Mediaevistik. We thank Prof. Classen for his largely positive review but add a note to the review posted here that clarifies what we view as some oversights in the review.

We invite our readers to read both the review and our Publishers’ Note.