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The Telegraph
Elena Ferrante among biggest selling authors of 2017
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David Walliams was the biggest-selling author of 2017, overtaking JK Rowling with sales of more than £16 million from his children’s books.
The writer and television presenter outsold fellow children’s authors Julia Donaldson and Philip Pullman, thriller writers James Patterson and Dan Brown, and TV chefs Jamie Oliver and Mary Berry.
Walliams published his first book for children in 2008 and has been billed as the successor to Roald Dahl. His two most recent books, The World’s Worst Children and Bad Dad, helped boost his sales by almost 20 per cent on the previous year.
He sold £16.57 million worth of books in 2017. Rowling came second in the list with sales of £15.47 million, as readers continued to lap up her Harry Potter books.
Donaldson was third with sales of £14.65 million, followed by Jamie Oliver on £11.44 million and Lee Child on £7.5 million.
The figures, compiled by Nielsen BookScan and published by The Bookseller, also showed that women dominated literary fiction sales last year.
Nine out of the 10 best-selling literary authors were female, with Haruki Murakami the only male.
Margaret Atwood topped the list with sales of £2.76 million, boosted by the Netflix adaptation of her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Helen Dunmore, who died last summer, was second in the list, followed by Sarah Perry, author of the runaway bestseller The Essex Serpent.
Naomi Alderman, Elena Ferrante, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Maggie O’Farrell and Arundhati Roy completed the top 10, edging out Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and the Nobel Prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Guardian
Female writers dominated 2017’s literary bestsellers, figures show
Flying in the face of Norman Mailer’s infamous comment that “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls”, Haruki Murakami was the sole male writer to make the Top 10 bestselling literary authors of 2017 in the UK.
The Bookseller’s analysis of literary fiction book sales last year found that Margaret Atwood was the bestselling literary novelist of the year, with television adaptations of her novels The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace pushing her sales up to almost £2.8m.
Sarah Perry, author of the award-winning The Essex Serpent, came in second with sales of around £1.6m. Helen Dunmore, who died last June but had a novel, The Birdcage Walk, and poetry collection, Inside the Wave, published in 2017, came in third, with sales of around £1.1m. The rest of the top five were Naomi Alderman, whose novel The Power won the Women’s prize for fiction, and Italian author Elena Ferrante, author of the acclaimed Neapolitan series.
Murakami, with sales of around £1m, came sixth, with the list completed by Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Maggie O’Farrell and Arundhati Roy.
The Bookseller’s Tom Tivnan admitted that the analysts were “making somewhat arbitrary value judgments about what is ‘literary’, and have limited ourselves to those who have been major award winners and/or shortlistees”. But he pointed out that both Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan failed to make the Top 10, each bringing in sales worth £855,000, along with the new Nobel literature laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, whose books made just over £709,000 in 2017.
Speaking on Wednesday, after just one publisher, the independent press And Other Stories, answered her call to publish only women in 2018, Shamsie said: “The list of writers on [the Bookseller’s] list is a reminder that literary fiction’s most beloved women writers are second to no one in terms of the quality of their work.”
But Shamsie, whose novel Home Fire was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and shortlisted for the Costa prize, added that “the list also underscores the bias at play when prize submissions, book recommendations by other writers, and reviews of literary fiction are so skewed towards men. That skewing isn’t about quality, or about the opinions of the reading public – it’s about gender bias that treats male writers as more ‘serious’, even if women writers are more popular among the (largely female) readership for fiction.”
According to a report from Arts Council England late last year, print sales of literary fiction have plummeted over the last decades, with few writers able to support themselves through literary fiction alone.
Despite women writers’ strong performance in literary fiction, they take up less than half of the slots in the Bookseller’s overall UK Top 50 bestselling authors of 2017. That list was topped by David Walliams for the first time, with just three women writers making the Top 10: JK Rowling, Julia Donaldson, and Fiona Watt, author of the That’s Not My … board book series for children. The list is made up of an eclectic mix of genres, with chef Jamie Oliver, thriller authors Lee Child and James Patterson, health guru Joe Wicks and children’s writers Jeff Kinney and Philip Pullman rounding out the ranking.
Bookpage
THE HOLD LIST: BINGE-READ A NEW SERIES
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
There’s a good chance you’ve already received recommendations for Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet from gushy friends, fervent booksellers and rhapsodic librarians. So no more excuses: Read it now, because chances are, you’ll love every soapy Italian moment. Plus, Ferrante is handling the screenplay for HBO’s forthcoming adaptation, so your Neapolitan infatuation may continue indefinitely.
The Millions
Return of the Ferrante
“According to an interview with her publishers in the Italian literary newsletter Il Libraio, translated in The Guardian, Ferrante is putting pen to paper once more.” A year after Elena Ferrante‘s alleged true identity was revealed by a journalist, the intensely-private author is writing again but has no plans to publish a novel in 2018. Pair with: staff writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee‘s essay on Ferrante, privacy, and woman writers.
Iris Lilian
The Vacation Book List You Never Knew You Needed
4. Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
As you might know, Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym and there has been widespread speculation over who Ferrante really is, although she is widely believed to have been unmasked by the New York Review of Books in 2016, a move which was heavily criticised by Ferrante’s readers as unnecessary and an invasion of her privacy.
Days of Abandonment, published in Italian in 2002, predates her more famous books, the Neapolitan Novels. However, for me, it was the book that woke me up to her writing and led me to notice Italian writing.
In Days of Abandonment, Mario tells his wife Olga that he is leaving her. She soon finds out that he is living with his new girlfriend, a much younger woman. The book describes the days that follow Mario’s departure. It starts with Olga’s inability to comprehend that her husband, the father of her children, has ceased to love her.
Through the course of the book, Ferrante brilliantly portrays the frantic churning of an ‘abandoned’ woman’s mind. In fact, I found her writing so furious and unsettling that 50 pages or so in, I had to put the book away for a few days to see if I still wanted to read it. I did pick it up again.
This is not a long book, so it is a good one for a flight or to read in a day or two. (188 pp. Europa Editions)
World Literature Today
World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2017
December 12, 2017
by Michelle Johnson
Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia, trans. Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions)
Looking back on 2017, it’s easy to declare the year a success for literary translation, which continued to thrive and move in exciting new directions. Of note, Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey into English. The first woman to do so, she gave the “epic a radically contemporary voice.” Following up last year’s The Seamstress and the Wind, And Other Stories brought out three new English translations of César Aira’s work—no doubt pleasing Patti Smith and many other eager readers. And three new books about translation enriched the conversation: Kate Briggs’s This Little Art, Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance, and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer.
Resisting again the temptation to expand our list, we offer an admittedly incomplete collection of the year’s English translations and invite you to add your favorites in the comments. You can also share those you’re most eagerly anticipating in 2018 by using the hashtag #2018Reads on Twitter and Facebook. Are you looking forward to Aslı Erdoğan’s The Stone Building and Other Places? Or Julián Herbert’s Tomb Song? Dubravka Ugrešić’s Fox? Let us know.
Thank you for being in conversation with us this past year. We look forward to continuing to serve as your passport to great global reading in 2018.
Núvol
La maternitat maligna d’Elena Ferrante
10.12.2017
La filla fosca és una novel·la torbadora sobre la maternitat, no apte per a dones embarassades però de prescripció facultativa per a qualsevol home o dona, sobretot si té la intenció de ser mare.
Publicada a Navona per Pere Sureda (que ara s’acaba de destapar amb una nova traducció castellana d’El conde de Montecristo) aquesta és la tercera entrega de la trilogia Cròniques del mal d’amor d’Elena Ferrante, enigmàtica autora italiana més coneguda a casa nostra per la tetralogia que va arrencar amb L’amiga genial, publicada a La Campana. Navona també ha publicat separadament les tres novel·les que componen la trilogia, L’amor que molesta i Els dies de l’abandonament, totes esplèndidament traduïdes per Anna Carreras.
La filla fosca és una novel·la sobre la malignitat que pot arribar a niar en la maternitat. Escrita en primera persona, la protagonista, Leda, és una professora divorciada que decideix passar les vacances en un poblet de la costa del mar Jònic, on lloga un apartament minúscul tota sola després que les seves dues filles, ja adultes, hagin optat per abandonar-la i traslladar-se a viure amb el seu pare a Canadà. Leda és una persona amb una capacitat d’introspecció vertiginosa, i una necessitat d’autocontrol extrema, unes virtuts que no impedeixen que sovint prengui decisions dràstiques i irreparables.
Durant les seves vacances, Leda passa el dia a la platja, sense relacionar-se pràcticament amb ningú. Un bon dia entaula una relació amb una família sorollosa del sud. Segueix amb atenció els moviments de Nina, una dona atractiva, i la seva filla Elena, que tot el dia juga amb una nina. Leda mantindrà amb aquestes persones una relació en principi superficial, amb una complexa alternança de simpatia i antipatia. El contacte, intermitent, esdevindrà absorbent a partir del moment que, en un rampell inexplicable, Leda decideix robar la nina de la petita Elena.
No es tracta d’una nina qualsevol, sinó de la nina de la nina d’una família. Estem parlant d’aquell element que el psicoanalista Donald Winnicott va definir com a ‘objecte transicional’, que permet a l’infant confrontar l’angoixa que li comporta separar-se gradualment de la mare.
La filla fosca és també la història d’aquesta nina, una nina que es convertirà en un ostatge custodiat per Leda i que acabarà sent el detonant d’un conflicte que es manté latent al llarg de tota la novel·la. El segrest de la nina és l’expressió d’una maternitat robada, la que la mateixa Leda va robar a les seves pròpies filles i a ella mateixa el dia que va decidir abandonar-les.
Aquest rampell furtiu de robar una nina, que ella mateixa no s’acaba d’explicar, es converteix en el gest fundacional de la novel·la, el que destapa en el seu interior una llarga confessió que acaba imantant totes les èpoques de la seva vida. Ferrante fa un estudi psicològic d’una profunditat que ens devora. En una imatge torbadora, Leda descriu el seu segon part com una expulsió que és també una autoexpulsió. Ferrante explica de manera convicent com la maternitat pot fer sortir el pitjor de l’interior d’una dona. La descripció de l’experiència de la maternitat, lluny de tota idealització, és expremuda amb tota la complexitat per extreure’n el suc de la malignitat. Imprescindible.
Little Buddha Blog
My 2017 in Fiction. Neil Gaiman, Elena Ferrante, Graeme Simsion and others
Elena Ferrante – The Neapolitan Novels
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, not a real name. And that mystery brings up a lot of emotional discussions about the real person behind it and the nature of the books. Some think it’s an autobiography, some even argue that the writer is male, which I find hard to believe having read her books. But everybody agrees that once you start reading her Neapolitan Novels, it’s impossible to break away.
The beginning of the first book disappointed me as it is written in kind of a crude childish manner. The story is set in a poor and run-down neighbourhood of Naples, full of violence. Two friends, the schoolgirls Elena Greko and Lila Cerullo, dream, read books and plan their way out of this little and limited community, they were born into.
The protagonist, Elena Greko, annoyed me all the way to the middle of the first book. She didn’t have any self-esteem, didn’t defend her personal borders, her best friend Lila manipulated her every way possible. But the style of storytelling changed as the heroines grew up and their view of the world developed. The deep voice and the great narration of Hilary Huber, reading the text of English translation of the novel, also dragged me in.
Only much later, when I read about the earthquake in Naples I realised why so many things in this book attracted me and pushed me away the same time. I saw the scenes of the earthquake for real – the crowds of people, the destruction, the overall life put to halt for a long time – I saw it all in Armenia when I was a little child. This whole environment in the book reminded me the small town in Armenia where I spent the first years of my childhood. I was lucky in a way. Having been born to an academic family, I didn’t have to fight for the right to get an education as Elena did. But a lot of the attributes of the environment seemed familiar either from my own memories or from stories told by my parents and relatives.
So the days passed, and I couldn’t get myself away from the audiobooks, listening every moment in the car, every second when my little one was asleep or played on his own on the playground. 4 books, almost 70 hours of audio, I fully immersed in the world of Elena and I realised, why it attracted so many readers. It shows naked feelings, feelings that hurt deeply and keep alive. The heroine has an amazing understanding of those feelings, her own and other people’s. She doubts herself all the time, but at the same time, she is brave enough to write about corruption and crime without having a second thought about the criminals who can recognise themselves in her writing. I am sure, this book could be an excellent subject for a dissertation on shame and vulnerability if Brene Brown got to it. But I am also sure that it’s a book that you couldn’t stay indifferent to. You either love it or hate it.
Literary Disco
EPISODE 115: MY BRILLIANT FRIEND
It’s been all the rage at book clubs everywhere.
We read the smash hit Italian novel from Elena Ferrante.
Julia is effusive. Tod is stoked. Rider is…argumentative.
Typical times at the Disco.