“If I read a book by a man, then the next one should be by a woman. That’s not exactly a chore. For example, I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, It’s an amazing work. I’m listening to her book on audio.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling novel, “The Sympathizer,” the story of a Communist double agent who moves to the United States. Last year Nguyen, who emigrated with his family from Vietnam when he was four, published his first collection of short stories, “The Refugees.”

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Fans of the writer’s Neapolitan novels are flocking to discover the south Italian city, whose personality is as important to the books as the protagonists

Lisa O’Kelly

Sun 25 Feb 2018 07.00 GMT

Like many tourists in Naples, I have only ever been there en route to somewhere else. For years the city has had a reputation for being dirty, dangerous and traffic-choked: why on earth would anyone choose to linger? But this has changed. Naples is becoming a destination in its own right, thanks in part to the huge popularity of the enigmatic author Elena Ferrante. And with the city’s rubbish-collection problem solved and new traffic restrictions in the centre, it is looking in better shape than it has done for decades.

Ferrante, who writes under a pseudonym, is the most important literary sensation to have emerged from Italy in a generation. Her quartet of Neapolitan Novels has sold more than 5.5 million copies worldwide. The New York Times observed that enthusiasm for the novels is so intense that it is being described in “epidemiological terms, making the phenomenon sound almost like an infectious disease”. Nor is Ferrante fever likely to cool any time soon: an Italian/American television adaptation of the first book My Brilliant Friend is under way. Filming starts in Naples next spring. The ultimate aim is to adapt all four novels over 32 episodes.

I came late to the books, prompted to pick up the first volume by the outrage around Italian reporter Claudio Gatti’s controversial unmasking of Ferrante’s supposed true identity. Needless to say, I loved My Brilliant Friend and devoured the next three, gripped by Ferrante’s rich portrait of the hard lives and intense friendship of the two protagonists – Elena and Raffaella (who call each other Lenù and Lila) – who grow up in a poor, violent neighbourhood against a background of mafia vendettas and social and political unrest in the 1960s and 70s.

We stop at a traditional pastry shop like the one run by the Solara brothers for a coffee and a sfogliatella
Naples is as much a character in Ferrante’s writing as Lenù and Lila themselves. Her “dark streets full of dangers, unregulated traffic, broken pavements, giant puddles … clogged sewers” work their way deep into your imagination. So you finish the Neapolitan novels not only with a sigh of regret, but an insistent desire to get to know the city for yourself.

“People began asking hotels and tour operators in the area: ‘How can we find the locations in the novels?’” says Caterina dei Vivo of Progetto Museo, a Naples-based cultural heritage preservation group. “They wanted to see the stradone, the Vomero, the Rettifilo, the Corso Umberto.” Progetto Museo quickly launched a Ferrante tour of the city earlier this year and several others have jumped on board since then.

I decided to combine my tour with a few nights in Sorrento. A picturesque tumble of dark red villas and ochre hotels perched on the edge of the Bay of Naples, the town works as a base not only for visits to the city – about 50 minutes away by boat, or an hour by train – but for the Amalfi coastal path (the “pathway of the gods”), Campania’s hillside towns and the islands of Capri and Ischia, too. Pompeii and Heculaneum are an easy train ride away.

I was met off the boat from Sorrento by the impressively qualified Caterina, a Neapolitan with a PhD in the preservation of cultural heritage. Along with the two others in our group, I was keen to visit the working-class neighbourhood where Lenù and Lila grow up: the Rione Luzzatti in the south of the city. Frustratingly, Caterina won’t take us there. Now mainly social housing, it has a reputation for crime and is apparently “too sad and depressing” for us. Instead, we set off into the old city where our first stop was Corso Umberto, known locally as the Rettifilo. This is the main street connecting the rione [administrative district] with the city, where Lenù and Lila first start going out alone with friends – with disastrous consequences one night when the Solara brothers pick a vicious fight with some obnoxious private school boys. It is also home to the bridal shops visited by 16-year-old Lila as she prepared for her lavish wedding to Stefano Carracci. Every window is awash with frothy white lace and rainbow-coloured bridesmaids’ dresses.

Three sheets to the wind … a backstreet in Spaccanapoli. Photograph: Alamy
We turn left into the university district where Lenù found her first job in a bookshop and Nino, the love of her life, worked as a leftwing lecturer. As in the books, the lecture theatres are daubed with radical slogans – a “lotta dura” [a 60s political slogan, now more associated with football] here, a hammer and sickle there and students hand out revolutionary flyers to passersby. Next stop is Via dei Tribunale, where Lenù attended political meetings with her friends in the Red Brigades. We stop at a traditional pastry shop like the one run by the Solara brothers in the novels for a coffee and a sfogliatella, a shell-shaped pastry which originated in Naples, filled with vanilla, cinnamon and orange-flavoured ricotta.

The city centre feels wonderfully unmodernised, its dark, narrow streets dripping with faded laundry, lucky bunches of dried red chillies outside every house and shop front. Walls are buried beneath layers of posters, stickers, graffiti and grime. Scooters zoom past, horns blare and truck brakes hiss. I’m struck by the absence of chains, such as Starbucks and McDonald’s. Caterina says the multinationals know they cannot compete with the street food of Naples: fried pizza, potato croquettes, courgette flowers in batter, fried anchovies and fried mozzarella are sold on every corner in brown paper cones – cuoppo – for just a few euros apiece. Pungent Neapolitan coffee likewise.

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By Jim Milliot | Feb 23, 2018

Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child landed in the top spot in France at the end of January and was in second place on Germany’s bestseller list last month. The novel was published in the U.S. in fall 2015 by Europa Editions.

At the end of last month, Still Me by JoJo Moyes was in first place in Germany; the novel has been at the top of PW’s charts as well since its release in early January. Bernhard Schlink’s newest novel, Olga, was in third place on the bestseller list. Schlink had a huge hit in the U.S. in 1995 with The Reader, and his most recent book released in America was The Woman on the Stairs, which Pantheon published last March.

Back in France, two new books followed Lost Child on the fiction list. In second place was Prix Goncourt–winner Pierre Lemaitre with his latest, The Colors of Fire. In the third spot was And Me, I Still Live by Jean d’ Ormesson, the highly respected French novelist of more than 40 books and member of the Académie Française, who died in December.

Two nonfiction titles led the combined bestseller list in the Netherlands in January: Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and A Retrospective of 2017 by Han van Bree. Dan Brown’s Origin was in fifth place. (Origin was also #2 in Spain, #3 in Sweden in fiction, and #4 on Italy’s combined list.)

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Elena Ferrante among biggest selling authors of 2017

by Anita Singh

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.

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.

Elena Ferrante Is Writing Again!!!

By Anna Silman

Finally, some good news: Elena Ferrante is writing again.

Last year, after Ferrante’s identity was allegedly outed by Italian journalist Claudio Gatti — despite her oft-stated desire to remain anonymous — many worried that the pseudonymous author of the Neapolitan novels would never write again. But much like Lila Cerullo taking up arms at Bruno Soccavo’s sausage factory (shoutout to my fellow Ferrante-heads!), your literary girl crush isn’t about to let some silly man crush her spirit.

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. “I know she is writing, but at the moment I cannot say anything more,” revealed publisher Sandro Ferrari, who adds there are no plans for a novel to come out next year.

Ferrante is reportedly also working on a screenplay for the TV adaptation of the Neapolitan novels, which is slated to air on HBO in the United States. Hillary Clinton must be so pleased.

Elena Ferrante is writing again, publisher says

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome

New work is understood to be a novel separate from TV screenplay writer is working on for adaptation of Neapolitan series

Elena Ferrante is back. And she’s busy.

It has been just over a year since the Italian novelist behind My Brilliant Friend and the rest of the highly acclaimed Neapolitan series was outed by an investigative journalist who claimed to have discovered her true identity.

Since then, fans of Elena Ferrante, who has always written under a pen name, had reason to worry she might not return. In interviews over the years, Ferrante suggested that her anonymity was a vital component of her work. Being unknown, she said, gave her the space and liberty to focus on her writing, free from the “anxiety of notoriety” or the temptation to censor herself.

The investigative journalist Claudio Gatti reported last October that Ferrante’s true name was Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator whose middle-class background differed from that fostered by Elena Ferrante, which more closely resembled the struggling background of her two protagonists. Gatti was criticised for a gross violation of the writer’s privacy and some believed he would be blamed if Ferrante disappeared from public life.

However, a recent interview with Ferrante’s publishers in Il Libraio, an Italian literary newsletter, included one line that could give fans relief: “I know she is writing, but at the moment I cannot say anything more,” said Sandro Ferri, who heads the publishing house Ediozioni E/O with his wife, Sandra Ozzola.

But Ferri said there were no plans for a new Ferrante novel to be published in 2018.

The publishers declined to offer any more details. But the new work is understood to be separate from the screenplay Ferrante is working on for a television series based on the Neapolitan novels, which will air on HBO and the Italian broadcaster RAI.