Description
Rosa, midway
through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan
daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose
ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces
from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself--by opening a
restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad
relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to
collaboration to emotional and physical love.
Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly
accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of
the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa's observations,
reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with
her own embattled mother's age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter's
inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of
lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on
hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as
Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H l ne Cixous, The Hunger of Women is
nothing less than a literary feast.
About the Author
MarosiaCastaldi, born in 1951, was a Neapolitanwriter and artist who spent most of her life in Milan, where she died in 2019.Her degree, from the University of Naples, was in philosophy, and after movingto Milan in 1971, she studied art at the Brera Academy. She exhibited work ingalleries across Europe and in the US and taught creative writing seminars atthe Scuola Holden in Turin and Lalineascritta in Naples. Her extraordinary andexperimental literary oeuvre includes the short story collections Abbastanzaprossimo (1986), Casa idiota (1990), Piccolipaesaggi (1993), the prose collection In mare aperto (2001), the theatrical text Calco (2008), and the novels Fermatakm 501 (1997), Per quante vite (1999), Chechiamiamo anima (2002), Dava fine alla tremenda notte (2004), Ildio dei corpi (2006), and the monumental Dentro le mie mani letue. Tetralogia di Nightwater (2007). The Hunger of Women, herfirst book to appear in English, was nominated for the Strega Prize in2012. Jamie Richards is anAmerican translator of Italian literature. She has translated books by Viola diGrado, Roberto Saviano, Igiaba Scego, Ermanno Cavazzoni, Manuele Fior, andothers. A 2021 NEA fellow, her work has appeared in numerous periodicals onlineand in print. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University ofIowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon.
