Spotify

“I think the expression ‘to leave something in the dust’ comes from screeching tires, but here’s another way to use it: when you pick up a book so good that everything else you’ve been reading (novel, nonfiction, New Yorkers) gathers dust on your nightstand. In 2015, I discovered Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and they left everything else in her dust. She has made high literature into a page turner, somehow creating a set of four books that contains not only the best writing I’ve ever read about poverty and a neighborhood, but also a suspenseful tale of friendship, marriage, and attainment. It’s like a modern George Eliot wrote a bildungsroman set in Naples, a book that arcs from Italian fascism to the rise of European feminism to the present day. One morning I was so lost in a Ferrante book that I had my daughter hide it from me so I would not play hooky from my own writing. What are you waiting for? Jump in her truck. Everything else can wait.