The Ferrante Letters

The Ferrante Letters
Author: Sarah Chihaya
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 023155088X

Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.

The Ferrante Letters

The Ferrante Letters
Author: Sarah Chihaya
Publisher: Literature Now
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-12-31
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780231194570

In The Ferrante Letters, four critics create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Elena Ferrante's work and her fictional world, they strike a tone that falls between the seminar and the book club.

Frantumaglia

Frantumaglia
Author: Elena Ferrante
Publisher: Europa Editions UK
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1609453042

This book invites readers into Elena Ferrante’s workshop. It offers a glimpse into the drawers of her writing desk, those drawers from which emerged her three early standalone novels and the four installments of My Brilliant Friend, known in English as the Neapolitan Quartet. Consisting of over twenty years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, it is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. In these pages Ferrante answers many of her readers’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives. She discusses her thoughts and concerns as her novels are being adapted into films. She talks about the challenge of finding concise answers to interview questions. She explains the joys and the struggles of writing, the anguish of composing a story only to discover that it isn’t good enough for publication. She contemplates her relationship with psychoanalysis, with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism, and with her childhood as a storehouse of memories, material, and stories. The result is a vibrant and intimate selfportrait of a writer at work.

The Lying Life of Adults

The Lying Life of Adults
Author: Elena Ferrante
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609455924

The New York Times–bestseller set in a divided Naples—now a Netflix original series—from the acclaimed author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter. A BEST BOOK OF 2020 The Washington Post·O, The Oprah Magazine·TIME Magazine·NPR·People Magazine·The New York Times Critics·The Guardian·Electric Literature·Financial Times·Times UK·Irish Times·New York Post·Kirkus Reviews·Toronto Star·The Globe and Mail·Harper’s Bazaar·Vogue UK·The Arts Desk Giovanna’s pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, he says, looks more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Is she turning into her Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father clearly despise? Surely there is a mirror somewhere in which she can see herself as she truly is. Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves from one to the other in search of the truth, but neither city seems to offer answers or escape. “Another spellbinding coming-of-age tale from a master.” —People Magazine, Top 10 Books of 2020 “The literary event of the year.” —Elle “Ms. Ferrante once again, with undiminished skill and audacity, creates an emotional force field that has at its heart a young girl on the brink of womanhood.” —The Wall Street Journal

The Days of Abandonment

The Days of Abandonment
Author: Elena Ferrante
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2005-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609450299

From the New York Times–bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, this novel of a deserted wife’s descent into despair—and rage—is “a masterpiece” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). The Days of Abandonment is the gripping story of an Italian woman’s experiences after being suddenly left by her husband after fifteen years of marriage. With two young children to care for, Olga finds it more and more difficult to do the things she used to: keep a spotless house, cook meals with creativity and passion, refrain from using obscenities. After running into her husband with his much-younger new lover in public, she cannot even refrain from assaulting him physically. In a “raging, torrential voice” (The New York Times), Olga conveys her journey from denial to devastating emptiness—and when she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal. “Quick, furious, simultaneously steely and unhinged, and completely mesmerizing.” —The New York Times “Intelligent and darkly comic.” —Publishers Weekly “Remarkable, lucid, austerely honest.” —The New Yorker

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Author: Elena Ferrante
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2014-09-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609452232

Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by “one of the great novelists of our time” (The New York Times). In the third book in the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” (Library Journal). “One of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” —NPR

The Beach at Night

The Beach at Night
Author: Elena Ferrante
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609453719

A “beautifully written” dark fable from a doll’s point of view—by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Lost Daughter and the Neapolitan Novels (The Washington Post). One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Readers of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter may recall the little doll—lost or stolen—around which that novel revolves. Here, Ferrante retells the tale from the doll’s perspective. Celina is having a terrible night, one full of jealousy for the new kitten, Minù; feelings of abandonment and sadness; misadventures at the hands of the beach attendant; and dark dreams. But she will be happily found by Mati, her child, once the sun rises . . . “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” —The Boston Globe

The Violet Hour

The Violet Hour
Author: Katherine Hill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2013-07-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476710341

A pitch-perfect, emotionally riveting novel about the fracturing of a marriage and a family: “A gripping debut” (People) from an award-winning young writer with superb storytelling instincts. Life hasn’t always been perfect for Abe and Cassandra Green, but an afternoon on the San Francisco Bay might be as good as it gets. Abe is a rheumatologist, piloting his coveted new boat. Cassandra is a sculptor, finally gaining modest attention for her art. Their beautiful daughter Elizabeth is heading to Harvard in the fall. Somehow, they’ve made things work. But then, tensions overflow, and they plunge into a terrible fight. In a fit of fury, Abe throws himself off the boat. “A bittersweet tale of breakup and forgiveness” (O, The Oprah Magazine), The Violet Hour follows a modern family through past and present. As Cassandra, Abe, and Elizabeth navigate the passage of time—the expectations of youth, the concessions of middle age, the headiness of desire, the bitterness of loss—they must come to terms with the fragility of their intimacy, the strange legacies they inherit from their parents, and the kind of people they want to be. Exquisitely written, The Violet Hour is “a rewarding family saga reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s novels...Hill’s story unfurls from the kind of sensational marital spat that makes you feel better about your own imperfect union…wonderfully witty and assured” (The Washington Post Book World).

Elena Ferrante as World Literature

Elena Ferrante as World Literature
Author: Stiliana Milkova Rousseva
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501357530

"A model of academic praxis." - Public Books Elena Ferrante as World Literature is the first English-language monograph on Italian writer Elena Ferrante, whose four Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014) became a global phenomenon. The book proposes that Ferrante constructs a theory of feminine experience which serves as the scaffolding for her own literary practice. Drawing on the writer's entire textual corpus to date, Stiliana Milkova examines the linguistic, psychical, and corporeal-spatial realities that constitute the female subjects Ferrante has theorized. At stake in Ferrante's theory/practice is the articulation of a feminine subjectivity that emerges from the structures of patriarchal oppression and that resists, bypasses, or subverts these very structures. Milkova's inquiry proceeds from Ferrante's theory of frantumaglia and smarginatura to explore mechanisms for controlling and containing the female body and mind, forms of female authorship and creativity, and corporeal negotiations of urban topography and patriarchal space. Elena Ferrante as World Literature sets forth an interdisciplinary framework for understanding Ferrante's texts and offers an account of her literary and cultural significance today.

Ties

Ties
Author: Domenico Starnone
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609453867

The Strega Award–winning Italian author’s “scalding and incisive” novel of marriage and family bonds that come undone in the wake of an affair (Library Journal, starred review). A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year Winner of the 2015 Bridge Prize for Best Novel Italy, 1970s. Like many marriages, Vanda and Aldo’s has been subject to strain, attrition, and the burden of routine. Yet it has survived intact. Or so things appear. The rupture in their marriage lies years in the past, but if one looks closely enough, the fissures and fault lines are evident. It is a cracked vase that may shatter at the slightest touch. Or perhaps it has already shattered, and nobody is willing to acknowledge the fact. Domenico Starnone’s thirteenth work of fiction is a powerful short novel about relationships, family, love, and the ineluctable consequences of one’s actions. Known as a consummate stylist and beloved as a talented storyteller, Domenico Starnone is the winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega. “The leanest, most understated and emotionally powerful novel by Domenico Starnone.” —The New York Times