Italy has a long history of short story writing -going back to Boccaccio (d. 1375) - and most of Italy's major writers produced collections of novelle. One of the greatest exponents is Giovanni Verga. The themes of his major novels are to be found in his short stories. Verga embraced verismo, the Italian form of French naturalism, where authorial comment and description is at a minimum. He creates an atmosphere and emotions in his writing which transcend the world of his characters, mainly Sicilian fishermen and peasants, and which give it a lyrical almost epic character. Although Verga writes about a small enclosed world, his work has universal appeal, touching the heart without lecturing or sentimentalising. This volume offers a wider and more varied selection of Verga's prose than has been published in English before and has been taken from four collections published between 1876 and 1887.