The Art of Joy

Description

The posthumous masterpiece from one of the most distinctive and important European voices of the twentieth century, now in paperback Goliarda Sapienza's The Art of Joy was written over a nine year span, from 1967 to 1976. Sapienza had been unable to find a publisher for what was to become her most celebrated work, due to its perceived immorality. The manuscript lay for decades in a chest finally being proclaimed a "forgotten masterpiece" when it was eventually published in 2005. This epic Sicilian novel, which follows its main character, Modesta, through nearly the entire span of the 20th century, is at once a coming-of-age novel, a tale of sexual discovery, a fictional autobiography, and a sketch of Italy's sociopolitical past.

Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) was born in Catania, Sicily in 1924, in an anarchist socialist family. At sixteen, she entered the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome and worked under the direction of Luchino Visconti, Alessandro Blasetti and Francesco Maselli. She is the author of several novels published during her lifetime. L'Arte Della Gioia is considered her masterpiece. Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., a former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for nearly twenty years. Her translation of Giovanni Arpino's Scent of a Woman (Penguin, 2011) was named the winner of The John Florio Prize for Italian Translation (2013).