Elena Ferrante
Books by Elena Ferrante
“The novel captures so much of the fraught subtext, the latent violence that often lies behind the more intense relationships. It’s basically the legacy of a family fallout, and how it trickles down the generations. So it’s familiar Ferrante terrain and she does it really well here.” Read more...
The best books on Family History
Thea Lenarduzzi, Journalist
“Ferrante is an enchanting describer of myth. To me, the most incredible parts of Frantumaglia are when she’s telling the story of Ariadne or the story of Dido. She has a fixation with weaving women, and that to me is the most interesting through-line of the book. She claims that her mother was a dressmaker, and there are these unbelievably luminous passages describing what it was like to accompany her mother to the fabric store to buy fabric and watch her fit clothes to other women. There emerges a parallel between making dresses—weaving fabrics together—and making stories—weaving language together.” Read more...
“The Beach At Night is a children’s book—or it’s supposed to be a children’s book. It’s really horrifying. The book is about a doll that gets left on the beach at night by her owner, a little girl who’s gotten a new little kitten and is much more interested in playing with the little kitten now than she is in playing with the doll. Many vicious things happen to the doll on the beach at night. She’s almost burned; part of her body melts off. There’s a man with a thick mustache who puts a golden wire down the doll’s mouth and forces her to speak her name.” Read more...
“Ferrante gets at something profoundly true about parenthood, that it is both a glorious and a torturous bond. One feels a natural resentment about the demands children place on you—a desire to run away from them and live unencumbered by responsibility—yet also a desire never to be separate from them.” Read more...
The Best Metaphysical Thrillers
Greg Jackson, Novelist
“It’s the most suffocating book I can think of—an incredibly claustrophobic novel in that it’s literally about a woman who’s trapped in her apartment with her children and her dying German shepherd … It’s the fictional exercise of being trapped in your home, the self you’ve constituted. It’s the opposite of home invasion; it’s the opposite of how most fiction works. There’s something so interesting about being with this one character in this one space. That image of disintegration—as you get scattered around the house, what happens? She moves around restlessly; there’s something wrong with the locks and she can’t get out.” Read more...
“I think one of the things that’s so interesting about these books is that we’re supposed to interrogate what friendship is. Because friendship is not nice—a lot of the time.” Read more...
Interviews where books by Elena Ferrante were recommended
-
1
My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante -
2
My Brilliant Friend: The Neapolitan Quartet
by Elena Ferrante -
3
The Beach at Night
by Elena Ferrante -
4
The Lost Daughter
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein -
5
The Days of Abandonment
by Elena Ferrante -
6
Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey
by Elena Ferrante
The Best Elena Ferrante Books, recommended by Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre
The Best Elena Ferrante Books, recommended by Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre
From her early novellas to the Neapolitan quartet, the elusive Elena Ferrante has achieved deserved superstar status for the compulsively readable, addictive quality of her writing. Two of the authors of The Ferrante Letters, Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre, introduce us to Ferrante and recommend what to read next after My Brilliant Friend.
-
1
The Invention of Morel
by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms -
2
If On A Winter's Night A Traveller
by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver -
3
Chess Story
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Joel Rotenberg -
4
The Intuitionist
by Colson Whitehead -
5
The Lost Daughter
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein
The Best Metaphysical Thrillers, recommended by Greg Jackson
The Best Metaphysical Thrillers, recommended by Greg Jackson
Metaphysical literature calls into question the very nature of reality, says the acclaimed US novelist Greg Jackson: it dramatises “the liquid mysteries of thought, pattern, and form.” Here, he highlights five ‘metaphysical thrillers’—artfully written novels powered by intrigue, which explore or embody philosophical dilemmas.
The best books on Family History, recommended by Thea Lenarduzzi
The story of a family never ends, says Thea Lenarduzzi—the literary critic and author of the prize-winning family memoir Dandelions: “It’s always evolving, rewriting itself, long after the protagonists are dead.” Here, she recommends five books on family history that illustrate the shapeshifting nature of this hard-to-pin-down subject, in which memories rarely tally with the written record.
