"The Wine Dark Sea" by Leonardo Sciascia
My absolute favorite stories here are “The Long Crossing”, in which a group of Sicilian peasants give up everything they own in order to pay a boat captain to take them to America - and eventually discovering the shock of their lives; the title story, “The Wine Dark Sea”, in which a man travels by train to his new job in Sicily, sharing his train compartment with a Sicilian family and learning more than he expected; “The Demotion”, in which a venerated saint was recently deemed non-existent by the Church and a perplexed husband who cannot understand why his wife and other women in the town occupy the church in protest - that is until he learns something about a “saint” of his own; and “Giufà”, an almost folkloric tale about a village idiot (based on an old Arabic folktake during Sicily’s Muslim period) who decides to go out hunting for a particular red headed bird only to make a deadly mistake. What follows is nothing short of hilarious.