**A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF 2022 (Air Mail)
**
Four new and revelatory essays by the author of My Brilliant Friend
and The Lost Daughter.
In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the
beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as "an oracle among authors."
Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the
origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her
struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she
describes the perils of "bad language" and suggests ways in which it has
long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine
talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson,
Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others.
Here is a subtle yet candid book by "one of the great novelists of our
time" about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins.
"Everyone should read everything with Elena Ferrante's name on
it."--The Boston Globe