Book summary

Before there was Mario Puzo, there was Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian author whose works were out of print in English for years before being reissued by New York Review Books. The thirteen short stories collected in THE WINE-DARK SEA push the envelope of the organized-crime genre, using the absurdities of the Mafia way of life (e.g., a mother who hides her child's killers from the police rather than break the code of silence) as the basis for inventive, darkly ironic literary fiction.

Media reviews

"[T]he absurdity, irony, and inadvertent fabulism in his stories have more in common with the literature of Eastern Europe than Italy....Sciascia...understood the Cosa Nostra intuitively, and confined himself to capturing the psychology, rather than the details. For him, it was both the cancer eating away at his society and a spark of rebellion kept alive in the hearts of a conquered people."