The new issue of Entertainment Weekly challenges readers with the question, “Do YOU Know Elena Ferrante?” (story not online yet).

If you don’t, you’re in good company. It turns out the author of this “rare interview” with Ferrante (Vogue also has one this month) hadn’t heard of her either until this summer, although “the Italian author’s urgent, blistering fiction has made her something of a cult sensation here in America.”

Attesting to that cult status, the New Yorker‘s redoubtable critic James Wood profiled Ferrante last year calling her “one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers … Compared with Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon is a publicity profligate.” Just last week, the New York Times Magazine asked three authors to address the question, “Who is Elena Ferrante?”

Entertainment Weekly goes on to call her Neapolitan series of novels, the third of which, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, was just released, “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,”

In the U.S., Ferrante is published by  Europa Editions.

The Neapolitan series:

#1  My Brilliant Friend, 2012  — OverDrive Sample

#2 The Story of a New Name, 2013 — OverDrive Sample

#3 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 9/2/14 — OverDrive Sample

Other titles available in the U.S, (all also from Europa Editions):

The Days of Abandonment, 2005 — OverDrive Sample

Troubling Love,  2008 — OverDrive Sample

The Lost Daughter, 2008 — OverDrive Sample

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2014 at 12:18 pm and is filed under 2014 -- Fall, Fiction, Literary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.