Ginzburg's plays have often been compared to the plays of the nineteenth-century Russian realist writer Anton Chekhov. Chekhov: Four Plays (1996) includes translations of his most celebrated plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard.

Luigi Pirandello, the most celebrated Italian playwright of the twentieth century, received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), his most widely acclaimed work, is an experimental play in which characters who have been rejected by the author appear on stage to interrupt the dialogue of the legitimate characters.

The Italian writer Giorgio Bassani, born in the same year as Ginzburg, is notable for his works depicting the lives of Jews in fascist Italy. His Five Stories of Ferrara (1956) includes five novellas tracing the growth of fascism and anti-Semitism in Italy from the 1920s through the...