elena ferrante
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Can’t Read Italian? Ask Mom To Translate
After reading the first two books in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Sara Goldsmith enlisted her mother to translate the third book from Italian so that she didn’t have to wait another year for the English release. Now, for Slate, Goldsmith shares how…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Sword and Her Sister
Frozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc
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Don’t “Fake” Read Ferrante
In preparation for the release of the last book of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Electric Literature’s Emma Adler offers a comprehensive “study guide” to the previous three books. While the article is “complete with hard-to-pronounce names, flashbacks and flash-forwards, and enough plot…
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Surface Envy
No matter how many times you tell them not to, people will judge a book by its cover. This Italian publisher has capitalized on our weakness for pretty things with iconic cover art that toes the line between literature and…
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Elena Ferrante Talks Anonymity
The London Review Bookshop has published a letter pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante wrote to her publisher before the publication of her first novel in 1991 that sort of explains why she wants to remain anonymous: I’ve already done enough for…
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Reading Between the Lines
Here is what I mean by meta-fiction: all these books, stories, and bodies of work contain made-up books and bodies of work. Some are based on real books. Some are making fun of real books, a little bit, gently. Some…
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BFFs in Elena Ferrante Novels
The literary idea that friends’ lives represent unmade choices, roads not taken, is applicable across gender and genre. Naturally, however, it has a particular resonance for women, because so many of life’s choices have particular resonance for women. Whether in…
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All Aboard
My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm. Not only was I seasick, I saw the population on board as…
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The Rumpus Interview with Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews talks about writing, mental illness, death with dignity laws, and the thin and sometimes troubling line between fiction and autobiography.
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But What About Me?
There’s a certain heuristic online these days that stems from a somewhat impossible idea that every narrated experience should contain, account for, and address every other one out there. There is no breed of reaction that deadens me more, for…
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The Rumpus Interview with Darcey Steinke
Darcey Steinke talks about her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, motherlessness, the Southern cult of femininity, and how becoming a woman has changed since she came of age in a small city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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Lost Daughter
The NYRB gives a profile of Elena Ferrante and her Naples novels, but the only thing more alluring than the author’s anonymity is the prose itself: There is a devastating exchange in The Story of a New Name, the second of…