Paolo, legato profondamente alla madre, non riesce ad avere un rapporto sereno con nessuna donna, né con Miram, innamorata e mite, né con Clara, una divorziata che decide di tornare dal marito quando capisce che il rapporto con Paolo non può essere appagante. Quando muore sua madre, Paolo, straziato dal dolore e in disperata solitudine, capisce però che forse solo da quel momento potrà cominciare a sperare di saper costruire un vero rapporto affettivo con una donna.

'Il turno di lei', 'Una volta', 'Biglietti, prego', 'Sole', 'Sorriso': questi i titoli dei cinque racconti che compongono questa raccolta. Racconti a 'tema', legati cioè in modo particolare ad uno dei temi fondamentali dell'arte di Lawrence: la relazione fra uomo e donna, dove a quest'ultima tocca la parte del vero protagonista, perché, anche quando vittima e anche nella apparente sconfitta, è pur sempre la donna l'eroe di questi racconti, in quanto è a lei che spetta di rivendicare il senso della propria esistenza e di testimoniare della latitanza, a volte assoulta, della sua controparte maschile.

Paul Morel è un giovane che vive una controversa educazione sentimentale. Il morboso legame con la madre impedisce sia a lui sia al fratello di avere relazioni stabili. Paul è combattuto fra l'amore per due donne, Miriam e Clara, e l'incapacità di sciogliersi dal vincolo del sangue che lo incatena alla madre. Solo con la morte di quest'ultima, evento al tempo stesso drammatico e salvifico, Paul sarà libero di avventurarsi verso la vita adulta. Il romanzo di Lawrence è qui proposto in una nuova edizione integrale, con ampia introduzione firmata da Giovanni Cianci.

Friends broaden our children's horizons, share their joys and secrets, and accompany them on their journeys into ever wider worlds. But friends can also gossip and betray, tease and exclude. Children can cause untold suffering, not only for their peers but for parents as well. In this wise and insightful book, psychologist Michael Thompson, Ph.D., and children's book author Catherine O'Neill Grace, illuminate the crucial and often hidden role that friendship plays in the lives of children from birth through adolescence.

Drawing on fascinating new research as well as their own extensive experience in schools, Thompson and Grace demonstrate that children's friendships begin early–in infancy–and run exceptionally deep in intensity and loyalty. As children grow, their friendships become more complex and layered but also more emotionally fraught, marked by both extraordinary intimacy and bewildering cruelty. As parents, we watch, and often live through vicariously, the tumult that our children experience as they encounter the “cool” crowd, shifting alliances, bullies, and disloyal best friends.

Best Friends, Worst Enemies brings to life the drama of childhood relationships, guiding parents to a deeper understanding of the motives and meanings of social behavior. Here you will find penetrating discussions of the difference between friendship and popularity, how boys and girls deal in unique ways with intimacy and commitment, whether all kids need a best friend, why cliques form and what you can do about them.

Filled with anecdotes that ring amazingly true to life, Best Friends, Worst Enemies probes the magic and the heartbreak that all children experience with their friends. Parents, teachers, counselors–indeed anyone who cares about children–will find this an eye-opening and wonderfully affirming book.


From the Hardcover edition.

Have you ever stepped back to watch what really goes on when your children play? As psychologist Lawrence J. Cohen points out, play is children's way of exploring the world, communicating deep feelings, getting close to those they care about, working through stressful situations, and simply blowing off steam. That's why “playful parenting” is so important and so successful in building strong, close bonds between parents and children. Through play we join our kids in their world–and help them to

• Express and understand complex emotions
• Break through shyness, anger, and fear
• Empower themselves and respect diversity
• Play their way through sibling rivalry
• Cooperate without power struggles

From eliciting a giggle during baby's first game of peekaboo to cracking jokes with a teenager while hanging out at the mall, Playful Parenting is a complete guide to using play to raise confident children. Written with love and humor, brimming with good advice and revealing anecdotes, and grounded in the latest research, this book will make you laugh even as it makes you wise in the ways of being an effective, enthusiastic parent.

Pronounced obscene when it was first published in 1915, The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrence's finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. “Lives are separate, but life is continuous—it continues in the fresh start by the separate life in each generation,” wrote F. R. Leavis. “No work, I think, has presented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth more compellingly than The Rainbow.”

'At any rate,' she said, scolding in tones too naked with love, I don't like it.'_'Go on from Allegro,'_ said Helena, pointing with her bow to the place on Louisa's score of the Mozart sonata. Louisa obediently took the chords, and the music continued.A young man, reclining in one of the wicker armchairs by the fire, turned luxuriously from the girls to watch the flames poise and dance with the music. He was evidently at his ease, yet he seemed a stranger in the room.

Introduction by Kathryn Harrison
 
Inspired by the long-standing affair between D. H. Lawrence's German wife and an Italian peasant, Lady Chatterley's Lover follows the intense passions of Constance Chatterley. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to an aristocratic mine owner whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent, Constance enters into a liaison with the gamekeeper Mellors. Frank Kermode called the book D. H. Lawrence's “great achievement,” Anaïs Nin described it as “his best novel,” and Archibald MacLeish hailed it as “one of the most important works of fiction of the century.” Along with an incisive Introduction by Kathryn Harrison, this Modern Library edition includes the transcript of the judge's decision in the famous 1959 obscenity trial that allowed Lady Chatterley's Lover to be published in the United States.

Una donna giovane e insoddisfatta lascia marito e figli e si avventura da sola sulle montagne messicane per incontrare gli indiani discendenti da Montezuma e dai re aztechi che le abitano e conoscere i loro dèi. Le basta imboccare un piccolo sentiero per inoltrarsi in un altro mondo, in un clima rarefatto e contagioso. Incontrerà i suoi indiani: sinuosi, insidiosi, femminei, feroci; spaventosamente impersonali e, come quel mondo, inumani.

Sullo sfondo della Grande Guerra, che scardina le famiglie allontanandone i componenti e che divide le coscienze alla luce del nuovo disordine mondiale, il caso fa incontrare nuovamente, dopo molti anni, una nobile signora inglese ed un conte tedesco, ferito e prigioniero del Paese divenuto nemico. Incontro dopo incontro, quel rapporto, dapprima superficiale, si approfondisce sempre di più; un rapporto strano, fatto di attrazione e repulsione insieme, che il lettore vede scorrere nella sua ambivalenza fino allo scioglimento finale, determinato dal ritorno dalla guerra del marito di lei.

Connie Chatterley è la moglie di sir Clifford, un aristocratico che in seguito a una ferita di guerra è diventato impotente (metafora della sterilità intellettualistica della sua cultura e della sua classe). Connie desidera la maternità e la sua carica vitale la spinge verso il guardiacaccia Mellors. Nasce tra i due una passione e, quando Connie si accorge di aspettare un bambino, lascia il marito e va a vivere insieme a Mellors.

FIRST PUBLISHED in a single volume in 1883, the stories collected in Little Novels of Sicily are drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood, reported at the time to be the poorest place in Europe. Verga's style is swift, sure, and implacable; he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath, and tells them with a stark economy of words. There's something dark and tightly coiled at the heart of each story, an ironic, bitter resolution that is belied by the deceptive simplicity of Verga's prose, and Verga strikes just when the reader's not expecting it.

Translator D. H. Lawrence surely found echoes of his own upbringing in Verga's sketches of Sicilian life: the class struggle between property owners and tenants, the relationship between men and the land, and the unsentimental, sometimes startlingly lyric evocation of the landscape. Just as Lawrence veers between loving and despising the industrial North and its people, so too Verga shifts between affection for and ironic detachment from the superstitious, uneducated, downtrodden working poor of Sicily. If Verga reserves pity for anyone or anything, it is the children and the animals, but he doesn't spare them. In his experience, it is the innocents who suffer first and last and always.

"The Little Novels of Sicily have that sense of the wholeness of life, the spare exuberance, the endless inflections and overtones, and the magnificent and thrilling vitality of major literature."-- The New York Times

"In these stories the whole Sicily of the 1860s lives before us . . . and whether his subject be the brutal bloodshed of an abortive revolution or the simple human comedy that can attend even deep mourning, Verga never loses his complete artistic mastery of his material."-- The Times Literary Supplement

With an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates
foreword by the author
Commentary by Carl van Doren, Rebecca West,
Aldous Huxley, and Henry Miller

It is . . . the world of the poets and the preponderance of the poet in [Lawrence] that is the key to his work. He magnified and deepened experience in the manner of a poet,' wrote Anaïs Nin in 1934.
        Privately printed in 1920 and published commercially in 1921, Women in Love is the novel Lawrence himself considered his masterpiece. Set in the English Midlands, the novel traces the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and the men with whom they fall in love. All four yearn for fufillment in their romantic lives, yet struggle in a world that is increasingly violent and destructive. Commenting on the novel, which was composed in the midst of the First World War in 1916, Lawrence wrote, 'The bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.' Rich in symbolism and lyrical prose, Women in Love is a complex meditation on the meaning of love in the modern world.
        To the critic Alfred Kazin, 'No other writer of [Lawrence's] imaginative standing has in our time written books that are so open to life.'

D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930), the son of a coal miner and a lace worker, completed his formal studies at University College, Nottingham, in 1908 and began teaching at a boys' school. By 1912, he had abandoned teaching to write full-time. His novels include The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), which was banned as pornographic in England until 1960.

With a new Introduction by Geoff Dyer
Commentary by Anthony Burgess, Jessie Chambers, Frieda Lawrence, V.S. Pritchett, Kate Millett, and Alfred Kazin

Of all Lawrence's work, Sons and Lovers tells us most about the emotional source of his ideas," observed Diana Trilling. "The famous Lawrence theme of the struggle for sexual power--and he is sure that all the struggles of civilized life have their root in this primary contest--is the constantly elaborated statement of the fierce battle which tore Lawrence's family."

Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. When it appeared in 1913, it was immediately recognized as the first great modern restatement of the oedipal drama, and it is now widely considered the major work of D. H. Lawrence's early period. This intensely autobiographical novel recounts the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict. The author's vivid evocation of the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction makes this one of his most powerful novels.

For the critic Kate Millett, "Sons and Lovers is a great novel because it has the ring of something written from deeply felt experience. The past remembered, it conveys more of Lawrence's own knowledge of life than anything else he wrote. His other novels appear somehow artificial beside it."

Gilbert Noon loses his job as a schoolmaster in Nottinghamshire and journeys to Germany, where he falls in love with a married woman

In questo racconto del 1924 che narra il viaggo 'iniziatico' di una giovane e bella donna sulle Montagne Rocciose emergono, con forza, alcune tra le tematiche più rilevanti del pensiero lawrenciano quali la ricerca di uno spazio non contaminato dalla civiltà, il desiderio di incontro e di contatto con un soggetto 'diverso', l'ansia di appaganti unioni sessuali. Così l'avventura della Principessa con Domingo Romero, la guida messicana, diviene per lo scrittore inglese occasione d'analisi, momento di profonda riflessione sul soggetto femminile.

Written during the winter of 1929-30 and his last major work, Apocalypse is Lawrence's radical criticism of the political, religious and social structures that have shaped Western civilization. In his view the perpetual conflict within man, in which emotion, instinct and the senses vie with the intellect and reason, has resulted in society's increasing alienation from the natural world. Yet Lawrence's belief in humanity's power to regain the imaginative and spiritual values which alone can revitalize our world also makes Apocalypse a powerful statement of hope. Presenting his thoughts on psychology, science, politics, art, God and man, and including a fierce protest against Christianity, Apocalypse is Lawrence's last testament, his final attempt to convey his vision of man and of the cosmos.

Abandoning his wife and children, Aaron Sisson leaves the mining community in pursuit of the 'life single': individual freedom, personal friendship, the 'male power' of passion and art.
Playing the flute to pay his way he travels to post-war London, where he mixes with the modern Bohemian set and finds male friendship in Rawdon Lilly. Further travels take him to Milan and Florence ('a town of men') preoccupied with thoughts on the decline of humanity from the Renaissance to the modern age. For Aaron, in his own way, is striving to save civilization.
Aaron's Rod was completed in 1921 but was then censored by Lawrence's publishers. This edition of the novel, based on the only authoritative surviving typescript, restores these cut passages and eliminates the errors of previous editions.

Perhaps no other of the world’s great writers lived and wrote with the passionate intensity of D. H. Lawrence. And perhaps no other of his books so explores the mysteries between men and women–both sensual and intellectual–as Women in Love. Written in the years before and during World War I in a heat of great energy, and criticized for its exploration of human sexuality, the book is filled with symbolism and poetry–and is compulsively readable.

It opens with sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, characters who also appeared in The Rainbow, discussing marriage, then walking through a haunting landscape ruined by coal mines, smoking factories, and sooty dwellings. Soon Gudrun will choose Gerald, the icily handsome mining industrialist, as her lover; Ursula will become involved with Birkin, a school inspector–and an erotic interweaving of souls and bodies begins. One couple will find love, the other death, in Lawrence’s lush, powerfully crafted fifth novel, one of his masterpieces and the work that may best convey his beliefs about sex, love, and humankind’s ongoing struggle between the forces of destruction and life.