The voice is instantly, almost violently recognizable — aloof, amused and melancholy. The metaphors are sparse and ordinary; the language plain, but every word load-bearing. Short sentences detonate into scenes of shocking cruelty. Even in middling translations, it is a style that cannot be subsumed; Natalia Ginzburg can only sound like herself.

Ginzburg died in 1991, celebrated as one of the great Italian writers. Her work is making its way again into the Anglophone world, encouraged, perhaps, by the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Ginzburg’s 1963 autobiographical novel, “Family Lexicon,” was published in an agile new translation by Jenny McPhee two years ago, and two other works of fiction, “The Dry Heart” and “Happiness, as Such,” have just been reissued, one in a new translation.

The family was her great obsession; it is “where everything starts,” she once said, “where the germs grow.” The families in these newly available books are petri dishes of fizzing dysfunction.

“The Dry Heart,” a novella translated with mirrorlike polish by Frances Frenaye, had fallen out of print. It begins bluntly: “I shot him between the eyes,” the narrator tells us, after killing her husband. “I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.” There was a mistress; a baby that died; desperate and failed attempts to conceive another — we learn all this in the first few pages. The mystery of the novel, its coiling allure, is not what happens or why but how. How does this woman, so dazed and daffy (like many Ginzburg heroines) — a woman prone to napping, not decisive action — arrive at this murderous point?