Elena Ferrante wrote of Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante’s 1948 masterpiece, “I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value.” It's no coincidence that the two novelists’ names rhyme; Ferrante chose her pen name precisely because she holds Morante in such high esteem. This month, NYRB publishes the first unabridged English edition of Morante's hugely-influential novel which will, hopefully, induce something akin to Ferrante fever and recalibrate the imbalance between her obscurity here and her iconic status in Italy. Elisa, narrator and protagonist of this family saga, is a twenty-five-year-old woman contemplating the loss of her adoptive mother and reflecting on her chief inheritance: a genetic predisposition toward self-deceit and delusions of grandeur. In Sicily, Elisa has locked herself in a heavily-curtained room at her guardian's house and vowed to remain until she has fully recounted the lies and fantasies that foregrounded her childhood; her hope is that in doing so she might lift her family's curse. A plot synopsis of the novel inevitably sounds melodramatic (incestuous love triangles, fabricated love letters), just as the libretto to a Mozart opera might, but there’s a vast cistern of emotion beneath the surface activity. Uncomfortable truths are repressed and lies are allowed to achieve an architectural significance, serving as the shaky foundation for generations that follow.