As much as we may admire extravagant flights of fancy or verbal legerdemain, we recognize honesty in a writer as soon as we encounter it and we honor it, even when – perhaps especially when – we don’t agree with the writer’s opinions. The literary honesty I have in mind doesn’t belong to any school or tendency; realism or naturalism possesses no more claim to it than does fable or fantasy. We recognize it in Kafka as well as in Chekhov, however different they may be otherwise. Nor is honesty inevitably allied with a stripped-down, bare-bones form of discourse; it can be as baroque as it can be laconic. However garbed, honesty comes through as a timbre, an accent, and grips our attention by an authenticity of tone that is as indefinable as it is unmistakable.

The Italian novelist, playwright, and short-story writer Natalia Ginzburg possessed such honesty. When we read her, we feel that we are listening to a voice that, whatever else it may do, will never consciously deceive. Ginzburg had a scrupulous yet lyrical sense of fitness; her words and her sentiments, however elusive or tenuous, move as a single shape. And though she is best known and loved for her fiction, which excels at what she rather demurely called “human relations,” she is also a superb essayist.

A new selection of her essays – she published four volumes of them in Italian – has now appeared in paperback under the title “A Place to Live” (Seven Stories Press, 237 pages, $12.95), translated by the well-known American novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz. The translation, interspersed with astute commentary and affectionate insights, occu pied Ms. Schwartz for more than 30 years; she tells us that she began the work both as a way of learning Italian and of drawing inspiration for her own fiction. Her long labor proved worthwhile, for her translation reads beautifully.

Near the end of her 1974 essay “Fantasy Life,” Ginzburg remarks that “we have a kind of allegiance to whatever has happened,” and she goes on to state that “this allegiance to what has happened leads us to a place that is the polar opposite of our long, drawn-out fantasy life, a place where everything is clear, inexorable, and real.” It can’t have always been easy for Ginzburg to maintain this allegiance, which is the source and root of her honesty. Born in Palermo in 1916, she was a witness to some of the most searing events of the past century. Even so, she never portrays herself as a victim.

One of her most enchanting essays, “Winter in the Abruzzi,” deals with the period of banishment to a primitive village, which she and her husband and children endured under the Fascists. She remarks:

My husband died in Regina Coeli prison in Rome a few months after we left the village. When I confront the horror of his solitary death, of the anguished choices that preceded his death, I have to wonder if this really happened to us, we who bought oranges at Giro’s and went walking in the snow. I had faith then in a simple, happy future, rich with fulfilled desires, with shared experiences and ventures. But that was the best time of my life, and only now, now that it’s gone forever, do I know it.

Ginzburg has a knack for seizing on those little, seemingly inconsequential moments, which we all experience but deem too trivial for mention, that are more revelatory than they first appear. In “My Psychoanalysis” she offers no lurid disclosures but slyly shows what happens when an inveterate novelist encounters a shrink; when she asked “Dr. B.” to explain the differences between Freud and Jung, “he spun out an elaborate explanation and at some point I lost the thread and got distracted gazing at his brass ring, the little silver curls over his ears, and his wrinkled brow, which he wiped with a white linen handkerchief. I felt like I was in school, where I used to ask for explanations and then get lost thinking of other things.” This rings true but it is also shrewd: What do Freud and Jung matter next to the specificity of the brass ring and the “little silver curls over his ears?”

One of the best essays in the collection is “My Craft,” about Ginzburg’s vocation as a writer (the Italian word mestiere, which she uses in the original, means more than mere “craft” – it is both profession and life’s work). Neither falsely modest nor preening – Ginzburg remarks “about the value of what I write, I know nothing” – the essay is the best description I know of the growth and development of the impulse to write, from first bungling efforts to self-assured mastery.

About the act of writing she neither cherishes nor fosters illusions: “I learned it was exhausting to write seriously. It’s a bad sign if you’re not exhausted. You cannot expect to produce something serious in any casual way, with one hand tied behind you, as it were, flitting around as the spirit moves you. You can’t get off so easily. When you write something serious, you sink into it and drown right up to your eyes.” Moreover, the work of writing is indifferent to moods: “You cannot expect to preserve your precious happiness fresh and intact, nor your precious unhappiness; everything recedes, disappears, and you’re alone with the page; no happiness or unhappiness can survive that isn’t intimately linked to that page; you possess nothing, you belong to no one, and if you don’t feel this way, that is a sign that your page is worthless.”

I wish that Ms. Schwartz had included other essays, especially the one which gives its title to Ginzburg’s first collection, “The Little Virtues.” This is available in English (though a little difficult to track down) in a fine translation by the poet Dick Davis. Ginzburg was an especially perceptive novelist on the gulf between generations, and in this essay she composed a kind of credo against inculcating children with “little virtues” – a love of money or of success – in place of the “big virtues.” One of those big virtues was the sense of vocation, which she defined as “an ardent and exclusive passion for something in which there is no prospect of money.” Ginzburg, who died in 1991, embodied this passion, unobtrusively but with fearless honesty, throughout her writing life, and it shines through every line of her incomparable essays.