Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child)

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright 2011-2015 by Edizioni E/O
First publication 2015 by Europa Editions
Translation by Ann Goldstein
Original Title: Lamica geniale
Translation copyright 2012-2015 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609453282

F ROM THE U NITED S TATES

Ferrantes 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 writersnot because shes innovative, but rather because shes unselfconscious and brutally, diligently honest.

Minna Proctor, Bookforum

Everyone should read anything with Ferrantes name on it.

The Boston Globe

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 nowone 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 youre reading her.

Entertainment Weekly

Ferrante can do a womans interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt.

Booklist

Elena Ferrantes 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 womens shadow selvesthose ambivalent mothers and seething divorces 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 memoryfrom the make-up and break-up quarrels of young girls to the way in which we carefully define ourselves against each other as teensFerrante wisely balances her memoir-like emotional authenticity with a wry sociological understanding of a society on the verge of dramatic change.

Megan OGrady, Vogue

Elena Ferrante will blow you away.

Alice Sebold

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

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 Italys most acclaimed authors.

The Barnes and Noble Review

[Ferrantes Neapolitan Novels] dont 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 fictions richest portraits of a friendship.

John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR

Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Ferrante draws an indelible picture of the citys 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

Elena Ferrante: the best angry woman writer ever!

John Waters

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 were inwhether its as wife, daughter, mother, friendand 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

The through-line in all of Ferrantes 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 jaccuse... Ferrantes effect, critics agree, is inarguable. Intensely, violently personal and brutal directness, familial torment is how James Wood ventures to categorize herdescriptions that seem mild after youve 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

Ferrantes own writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backward to its most radical birthing.The New Yorker

F ROM THE U NITED K INGDOM

Nothing quite like it has ever been published.

The Guardian

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 storys narrator, Elena. Ferrantes 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 currentslove, 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

F ROM I TALY

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay evokes the vital flux of a heartbeat, of blood flowing through our veins.

La Repubblica

We dont know who she is, but it doesnt matter. Ferrantes 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.