“What in fiction is enjoyable and beautiful is often terrifying in real life.”
Elena Ferrante
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Culture, Current Events, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes
Elena Ferrante and the “My Brilliant Friend” Adaptation for HBO
Merve Emre interviews Elena Ferrante about an upcoming HBO adaptation of her novel, “My Brilliant Friend.”
Posted inBooks, Highlight, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes
The Whole World is Naples Now
Sprawling, crumbling, beautiful, rough — Elena Ferrante’s Naples shows us the world’s violent underbelly, with no pretense.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Ferrante in Fragments of Her Choosing
At The New Republic, novelist Alexander Chee has an essay/review of Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, Ferrante’s new book of selected letters and interviews spanning nearly two-and-a-half decades.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
On ‘Remaining in the Shadows’: Elena Ferrante on Anonymity and Writing
After so many years, are you still sure about your decision to remain in the shadows? “Remain in the shadows” is not an expression I like. It savors of plots, assassins. Let’s say that, fifteen years ago, I chose to publish books without having to feel obliged to make a career of being a writer. […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
A Book in the Mail is the Cure For Ferrante Fever
As a regular book browser, or shelf stalker, and former employee of Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, I’ve recently watched several customers come in asking for recommendations of what to read next after finishing Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s four-volume saga, The Neapolitan Quartet — a masterwork concerning issues of class, status, and the remarkable complexity of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Elena Ferrante on the Historic Struggle of Women Writers
INTERVIEWER Do you think female fiction is constitutionally weak? FERRANTE Not at all. I’m talking about my adolescent anxieties. For obvious historical reasons, women’s writing has a less dense and varied tradition than male writing, but it has extremely high points and also an extraordinary foundational value—just think of Jane Austen. The twentieth century, besides, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Tolstoy’s Writing Mirrored His Own Life
There are a number of reasons a writer may waffle on the question of which events in the book match up with her life. Most writers receive the question of whether something in their fiction “really happened” as an accusation, without being exactly sure what they are being accused of. There can be the egotistical […]