Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment
(Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter
(Europa, 2008) and the Neapolitan Quartet (Europa 2012-2015). She
is also the author of a children's picture book illustrated by Mara
Cerri, The Beach at Night.
Ann Goldstein has translated into English all of Elena Ferrante's books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Story of the Lost Child, which was shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.
Praise for Elena Ferrante and The Neapolitan Novels The United
States "Ferrante's novels are intensely, violently personal, and
because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of
confession before the unsuspecting reader."
--James Wood, The New Yorker "One of the more nuanced portraits of
feminine friendship in recent memory."
--Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"Reading the story feels like being on a municipal beach in Naples:
almost too hot; defiantly gritty; inescapably, heartbreakingly
beautiful."--Emily Dagger, NPR
"Amazing! My Brilliant Friend took my breath away. If I were
president of the world I would make everyone read this book. It is
so honest and right and opens up heart to so much. Reading Ferrante
reminded me of that child-like excitement when you can't look up
from the page, when your eyes seem to be popping from your head,
when you think: I didn't know books could do this!"
--Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge "I like the Italian
writer, Elena Ferrante, a lot. I've been reading all her work and
all about her." -- John Waters, actor and director "Elena Ferrante
may be the best contemporary novelist you've never heard of."
--The Economist "Ferrante's freshness has nothing to do with
fashion...it is imbued with the most haunting music of all, the
echoes of literary history."
--The New York Times Book Review "I am such a fan of Ferrante's
work, and have been for quite a while."
--Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers "The women's fraught
relationship and shifting fortunes are the life forces of the
poignant book" -- Publisher's Weekly "When I read [the Neapolitan
novels] I find that I never want to stop. I feel vexed by the
obstacles--my job, or acquaintances on the subway--that threaten to
keep me apart from the books. I mourn separations (a year until the
next one--how?). I am propelled by a ravenous will to keep
going."
--Molly Fischer, The New Yorker "[Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels]
don't merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with
its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen,
womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern
fiction's richest portraits of a friendship."
--John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR
"Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time. Her
voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk . . .
In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the
deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a
new version of the way we live now -- one we need, one told
brilliantly, by a woman."
--Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review
"An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and
Elena, Bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in
world-class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression and
unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of
female friendship that the real world can drop away when you're
reading her."
--Entertainment Weekly
"It's just hypnotic. I could not stop reading it or thinking about
it."
--Hillary Clinton
"Ferrante seasons the prose with provocative perceptions not unlike
the way Proust did."
--Shelf Awareness
"It would be difficult to find a deeper portrait of women's
friendship than the one in Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, which
unfold from the fifties to the twenty-first century to tell a
single story with
the possessive force of an origin myth."
--Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"Ferrante's writing is so unencumbered, so natural, and yet so
lovely, brazen, and flush. The constancy of detail and the pacing
that zips and skips then slows to a real-time crawl have an almost
psychic effect, bringing you deeply into synchronicity with the
discomforts and urgency of the characters' emotions. Ferrante is
unlike other writers--not because she's innovative, but rather
because she's unselfconscious and brutally, diligently honest."
--Minna Proctor, Bookforum
"Ferrante can do a woman's interior dialogue like no one else, with
a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt."
--Booklist
"The truest evocation of a complex and lifelong friendship between
women I've ever read."
--Emily Gould, author of Friendship
"Elena Ferrante is the author of several remarkable, lucid,
austerely honest novels . . . My Brilliant Friend is a large,
captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman."
--James Wood, The New Yorker
"Compelling, visceral and immediate . . . a riveting examination of
power . . . The Neapolitan novels are a tour de force."
--Jennifer Gilmore, The Los Angeles Times
"Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay surpasses the rapturous
storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Ferrante's voice feels necessary. She is the Italian Alice
Munro."
--Mona Simpson, author of Casebook and Anywhere But Here
"Elena Ferrante will blow you away."
--Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
"The Days of Abandonment is a powerful, heartrending novel."
--Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Lowland
"The Neapolitan novel cycle is an unconditional masterpiece . . . I
read all the books in a state of immersion; I was totally
enthralled. There was nothing else I wanted to do except follow the
lives of Lila and Lenù to the end."
--Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Lowland
"Reading Ferrante reminded me of that child-like excitement when
you can't look up from the page, when your eyes seem to be popping
from your head, when you think: I didn't know books could do
this!"
--Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Burgess
Boys
"Elena Ferrante: the best angry woman writer ever!"
--John Waters, director
"The feverish speculation about the identity of Elena Ferrante
betrays an understandable failure of imagination: it seems
impossible that right now somewhere someone sits in a room and
draws up these books. Palatial and heartbreaking beyond measure,
the Neapolitan novels seem less written than they do revealed. One
simply surrenders. When the final volume appears--may that day
never come!--they're bound to be acknowledged as one of the most
powerful works of art, in any medium, of our age."
--Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
"Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force."
--Gwyneth Paltrow, actor
"Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name. Book two in her Naples
trilogy. Two words: Read it."
--Ann Hood, writer (from Twitter)
"Ferrante continues to imbue this growing saga with great
magic."
--Booklist(starred review)
"One of Italy's best contemporary novelists."?
--The Seattle Times "Ferrante's emotional and carnal candor are so
potent."
--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Elena Ferrante's gutsy and compulsively readable new novel, the
first of a quartet, is a terrific entry point for Americans
unfamiliar with the famously reclusive writer, whose go-for-broke
tales of women's shadow selves--those ambivalent mothers and
seething divorcées too complex or unseemly for polite society (and
most literary fiction, for that matter)--shimmer with Balzacian
human detail and subtle psychological suspense . . . The Neapolitan
novels offer one of the more nuanced portraits of feminine
friendship in recent memory--from the make-up and break-up quarrels
of young girls to the way in which we carefully define ourselves
against each other as teens--Ferrante wisely balances her
memoir-like emotional authenticity with a wry sociological
understanding of a society on the verge of dramatic change."
--Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"My Brilliant Friend is a sweeping family-centered epic that
encompasses issues of loyalty, love, and a transforming Europe.
This gorgeous novel should bring a host of new readers to one of
Italy's most acclaimed authors."
--The Barnes and Noble Review
"Ferrante draws an indelible picture of the city's mean streets and
the poverty, violence and sameness of lives lived in the same place
forever . . . She is a fierce writer."
--Shelf Awareness
"Ferrante transforms the love, separation and reunion of two poor
urban girls into the general tragedy of their city."
--The New York Times
"Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein . . . Ferrante writes with
a ferocious, intimate urgency that is a celebration of anger.
Ferrante is terribly good with anger, a very specific sort of wrath
harbored by women, who are so often not allowed to give voice to
it. We are angry, a lot of the time, at the position we're
in--whether it's as wife, daughter, mother, friend--and I can think
of no other woman writing who is so swift and gorgeous in this
rage, so bracingly fearless in mining fury."--Susanna Sonnenberg,
The San Francisco Chronicle
"Everyone should read anything with Ferrante's name on it."
--The Boston Globe
"The through-line in all of Ferrante's investigations, for me, is
nothing less than one long, mind-and-heart-shredding howl for the
history of women (not only Neapolitan women), and its implicit
j'accuse . . . Ferrante's effect, critics agree, is inarguable.
'Intensely, violently personal' and 'brutal directness, familial
torment' is how James Wood ventures to categorize her--descriptions
that seem mild after you've encountered the work."
--Joan Frank, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Lila, mercurial, unsparing, and, at the end of this first episode
in a planned trilogy from Ferrante, seemingly capable of starting a
full-scale neighborhood war, is a memorable character."--Publishers
Weekly
"An engrossing, wildly original contemporary epic about the demonic
power of human (and particularly female) creativity checked by the
forces of history and society." --The Los Angeles Review of
Books
"Ferrante's own writing has no limits, is willing to take every
thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backwards to its
most radical birthing."-
--The New Yorker The United Kingdom "The Story of a New Name, like
its predecessor, is fiction of the very highest
order."--Independent on Sunday
"My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein, is stunning: an
intense, forensic exploration of the friendship between Lila and
the story's narrator, Elena. Ferrante's evocation of the
working-class district of Naples where Elena and Lila first meet as
two wiry eight-year-olds is cinematic in the density of its
detail."
--The Times Literary Supplement
"This is a story about friendship as a mass of roiling
currents--love, envy, pity, spite, dependency and Schadenfreude
coiling around one another, tricky to untangle."
--Intelligent Life
"Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have
never heard of. The Italian author has written six lavishly praised
novels. But she writes under a pseudonym and will not offer herself
for public consumption. Her characters likewise defy convention . .
. Her prose is crystal, and her storytelling both visceral and
compelling."
--The Economist
Ferrante is an expert above all at the rhythm of plotting: certain
feuds and oppositions are kept simmering and in abeyance for years,
so that a particular confrontation - a particular scene - can be
many hundreds of pages in coming, but when it arrives seems at once
shocking and inevitable."
--The Independent Italy
"Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay evokes the vital flux of a
heartbeat, of blood flowing through our veins."
--La Repubblica
"We don't know who she is, but it doesn't matter. Ferrante's books
are enthralling self-contained monoliths that do not seek
friendship but demand silent, fervid admiration from her passionate
readers . . . The thing most real in these novels is the intense,
almost osmotic relationship that unites Elena and Lila, the two
girls from a neighborhood in Naples who are the peerless
protagonists of the Neapolitan novels."
--Famiglia Cristiana
"Today it is near impossible to find writers capable of bringing
smells, tastes, feelings, and contradictory passions to their
pages. Elena Ferrante, alone, seems able to do it. There is no
writer better suited to composing the great Italian novel of her
generation, her country, and her time than she."
--Il Manifesto
"Elena Ferrante is a very great novelist . . . In a world often
held prisoner to minimalism, her writing is extremely powerful,
earthy, and audacious."
--Francesca Marciano, author of The Other Language
"Regardless of who is behind the name Elena Ferrante, the
mysterious pseudonym used by the author of the Neapolitan novels,
two things are certain: she is a woman and she knows how to
describe Naples like nobody else. She does so with a style that
recalls an enchanted spider web with its expressive power and the
wizardry with which it creates an entire world."
--Huffington Post (Italy)
"A marvel that is without limits and beyond genre."
--Il Salvagente "Elena Ferrante is proving that literature can cure
our present ills; it can cure the spirit by operating as an
antidote to the nervous attempts we make to see ourselves reflected
in the present-day of a country that is increasingly
repellent."
--Il Mattino "My Brilliant Friend flows from the soul like an
eruption from Mount Vesuvio."
--La Repubblica Australia
"No one has a voice quite like Ferrante's. Her gritty, ruthlessly
frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack
that is also a defense . . . Ferrante's fictions are fierce,
unsentimental glimpses at the way a woman is constantly under
threat, her identity submerged in marriage, eclipsed by motherhood,
mythologised by desire. Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll
have some idea of how explosive these works are."
--John Freeman, The Australian
"One of the most astounding--and mysterious--contemporary Italian
novelists available in translation, Elena Ferrante unfolds the
tumultuous inner lives of women in her thrillingly menacing stories
of lost love, negligent mothers and unfulfilled desires."
--The Age
"Ferrante bewitches with her tiny, intricately drawn world . . . My
Brilliant Friend journeys fearlessly into some of that murkier
psychological territory where questions of individual identity are
inextricable from circumstance and the ever-changing identities of
others."
--The Melbourne Review
"The Neapolitan novels move far from contrivance, logic or
respectability to ask uncomfortable questions about how we live,
how we love, how we singe an existence in a deeply flawed world
that expects pretty acquiescence from its women. In all their
beauty, their ugliness, their devotion and deceit, these girls
enchant and repulse, like life, like our very selves."
--The Sydney Morning Herald
"The best thing I've read this year, far and away, would be Elena
Ferrante...I just think she puts most other writing at the moment
in the shade. She's marvelous. I like her so much I'm now doing
something I only do when I really love the writer: I'm only
allowing myself two pages a day."
--Richard Flanagan, author of Book prize finalist, The Narrow Road
to the Deep North Spain
"Elena Ferrante's female characters are genuine works of art . . .
It is clear that her novel is the child of Italian neorealism and
an abiding fascination with scene."
--El Pais
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