For a second summer in a row, we are delving into the world of Elena Ferrante. This time around, our series of three seminars will focus on the Neapolitan Novels, which for many has marked the entry point into Ferrante’s Naples. Published between 2011 and 2015, the four novels follow Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo over the course of their sixty-years-long friendship. The world of the Neapolitan Novels have changed our reading lives, and the way in which we understand authorship and translation. My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in the series, topped The New York Times Book Review list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. A television adaptation directed by Saverio Costanzo has garnered critical acclaim, and Ferrante’s success has created renewed interest in the writing of Italian female authors. 

We will explore the Neapolitan Novels one theme at a time, rather than one book at a time. We will discuss friendship, dissolving margins, and motherhood, while also working through questions of translation, class, gender, sexuality, as well as other emotions and ideas these novels have ignited. 

We invite you to join us, whether you’ve read the whole series, the first novel, or none of it at all! Each conversation will be open to all levels of familiarity with Ferrante’s work and we will provide passages from the novels themselves, as well as excerpts from other texts, that have informed our own reading. As always, we invite you to read Ferrante in the original Italian, Ann Goldstein’s English translation, or any other language through which you encountered the Neapolitan Novels. Translation, and its impact on our reading of Ferrante, will be a major theme throughout our conversations. 

We will meet at Tills Bookshop by the Meadows for an intimate discussion, surrounded by second-hand books at 18:30 on June 20th, July 4th, and July 18th. Join us for another Ferrante summer!