9 Books To Read If You Miss English Class

MELISSA RAGSDALE

I know I just wrote an article about how I wasn’t crazy for high school English, but here’s the thing: I miss English class more than anything. After I graduated high school, and while in college, I became thoroughly addicted to in-class literary discussion, eventually getting a B.A. in English. Maybe it’s the difference between high school and college class structures, maybe it’s because of changes in myself, but in college, I fell hard and fast for the magic of English Lit class. And now that I’m out, I’m dying to go back.

Books you read for English class have their own special shine to them. They have to be ripe with literary merit, and they have to have room for interpretation and discussion. They awaken thoughts and opinions inside of you, and they beg to have papers written about them.

With this list, I tried not to just rattle off the old stand-bys. I pulled a mix of contemporary and older literature, selecting books that awaken that English major spirit. (Not that you had to have majored in English or even gone to college to get a kick out of these.) Some of the books on this list were actually parts of my personal curriculum, while others deserve to be.

So, dust off those highlighters and sharpen your intellect. Class is in session.

1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante has certainly been making waves — if you love English lit and you haven’t picked her up, this is definitely your next read. Telling the story of two girls growing up in tumultuous Naples in the 1950s, Ferrante’s writing is elegant, captivating, and has just the right amount of heft to it. As John Freeman puts it: “Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.”

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Elena Ferrante’s Naples, Then and Now

By ANN MAH JAN. 14, 2016

The historic center of Naples drips with Old World charm — faded laundry strung between buildings, fish shops spilling tubs of clams and eels onto the sidewalk, pasticcerie tucked near Renaissance churches.

But I was looking for something else. I had come to Naples without a guidebook or even a map, in search of a disheveled neighborhood of “flaking walls” and “scratched doors,” where the “wretched grey” of the buildings clashed with the passion and repression of the characters of the writer Elena Ferrante. Armed only with her series of Neapolitan novels, I was in search of a city that — through four weighty volumes, best sellers both in the United States and Italy — had become a character itself: dangerous, dirty and seductive, the place everyone yearns to leave behind, and the place they can’t shake.

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My Favorite Cultural Moments of 2015

BY SARAH LARSON

Ferrante Fever, as the condition is proudly called by Elena Ferrante’s publisher, Europa Editions, has been building for the past few years, since the release of the first book of the Neapolitan novels, “My Brilliant Friend.” But I have had that fever for a decade, because, as her translator Ann Goldstein’s devoted apprentice and friend, I have been proofreading Ferrante since “The Days of Abandonment,” published in 2005. The thrill of breaking The New Yorker’s style rules—violating all kinds of American grammatical conventions as we go—has been only one of the joys of working on Ferrante’s arresting, unputdownable books. Another has been trying to figure out how Ferrante manages to make her plot twists so character-driven and inevitable, and of basking in that strange and wonderful feeling that the books were written just for you. Seeing mobs of readers cheer for Ann, focussing their love on absent author and present translator at once, has been thrilling to behold. It’s not every day that BookCourt evokes Altamont.

The question for Elena Ferrante

A challenge in writing about the mysterious author Elena Ferrante, as I did recently for the Daily News, is how to deal with her anonymity.

Her anonymity is beside the point, but it is also unique. She would be newsworthy for her talent, but her reclusiveness is also entangled with her art. When I asked Jonathan Franzen if he envied Elena Ferrante her anonymity, he answered: “I respect her anonymity as a personal artistic choice. But anonymity can be almost as distracting as publicity. You don’t have to put up with people misquoting and misconstruing you, but you do have to put up with people constantly talking about your anonymity. Both situations are a distraction from the work, which is the only thing that matters.”

He’s right. There is essentially no ideal solution for an acclaimed writer to keeps readers focused only on the work.

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Bookspotting: Alissa is reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Ever wonder what Penguin Random House employees are reading? We’re a bunch of professionally bookish people, so you can always count on us to have a book on hand… or thirty piled on our desks. Our Bookspotting feature shows off the range of readers behind the scenes at Penguin Random House.  

#FerranteFever: What’s fueling the passion for these captivating novels — and turning their secretive creator Elena Ferrante into a superhero?

by Elizabeth Mitchell

THE MYSTERIOUS AUTHOR who goes by Elena Ferrante first discussed her idea for a novel that would become the now-legendary Neapolitan series with her Italian publishers over a lakeside lunch on a sunny summer afternoon in 2009.

“She told us that she wanted to write the story of two friends, middle-aged, and in Naples,” recalls Sandra Ozzola Ferri, Ferrante’s editor and the co-founder, with husband Sandro Ferri, of the Italian publishing house Edizioni E/O. Ferrante had been thinking about her own relationship with a friend who had died, and had envisioned a pivotal wedding scene. Most of the novel’s characters are gathered in one tableau, a group the narrator, Elena, hopes to escape. Sandra continues: “When Elena looks at the crowd and says, ‘Ah, these are the plebes, the ignorant ones and, not only poor, but vulgar.’ Everything is dirty — the floor, the people — and she is really very frightened. This is what she wanted. It was practically one of her first ideas.”

It took Ferrante less than five years to create her epic tale, which sprawls to nearly 1,700 pages. Her impulse to conjure her deceased friend had wired her to crowds of other ghosts, political street violence, abusive industrial conditions, birth, death and betrayal. Sometimes the writing would go so smoothly, she would carry on for 50 to 100 pages without going back to reread or rewrite.

Sandra recalls how odd it was that Ferrante wrote what is now being called a masterpiece with no outline. “She had only the beginning and the end,” Sandra says.

“Practically no notes,” Sandro Ferri adds. “Only in her head.”

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What Australians are reading this summer, from Magda Szubanski to Bill Bryson

Elena Ferrante also filled many Christmas stockings with her four-part Neapolitan Novels series. The first novel in the collection, My Brilliant Friend, creates a realistic and unsentimental portrait of female experience, rivalry and friendship.

It’s become a global phenomenon and “people are loving [the series] as they’re getting a lovely long look at Italian life, post World War II,” says Gleebooks’ David Gaunt.

Review: Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’ an epic tour de force

by Adam Parker

An Electrifying Modern Classic about Growing Up and Growing Apart

By Hilary Krutt

When I was eight, I found my best friend. Alice,* like me, was a voracious reader, with a wild imagination and a penchant for the written word. We spent days adventuring in the woods adjacent to my backyard, fashioning a woodland home from fallen branches and sweeping the forest floor with pine needles. We invented our own language and took pleasure in communicating on a different plane from our classmates. We were at home among books, taking pride in our shared position at the top of the third grade class.

Then came fourth grade, and the first heartbreak of my young life. I was enamored of Evan, the heartthrob of our elementary school class. When I finally garnered the courage to alert him to my true feelings—which, in typical nine-year old fashion, I communicated secondhand through a friend—I was astonished to learn that he had a crush on Alice. Though we remained close through adolescence, my friendship with Alice was thereafter tainted by the petty jealousies and self-doubts that plagued me as I grew from an awkward and gangly child into a self-assured woman in my own right.

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Editors choose their ‘winners and losers’ of 2015

Max Porter’s debut Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber), Man Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings(Oneworld) by Marlon James and Elena Ferrante‘s Neopolitan quartet (Europa) are among the titles highlighted by publishers as books that made their year, or that they wish they had published.

The mystery of our favourite writers

f you are a certain kind of reader, this year you would have read a piece every week about the Mysteries of Elena. Elena Ferrante, that is. Over the last decade, as more of her grand novels of female friendship have been translated from Italian, her fame and mystery have both grown in geometric proportions in the anglophone world. Observe her media policy: one country, one interview. Yes, that’s right. One country, one interview.

Ferrante is a lovely Banksy-sized mystery for the literary fiction world, which is still disproportionately proud of its white men with black-framed glasses. And no one who has actually read her can continue to speculate that she is a dude. Please stop. Every possible thing that has been said about Ferrante’s identity has already been said about women authors, and not just reclusive women authors. Take a look at the cover of the 1983 book by Joanna Russ, ‘How to Suppress Women’s Writing’. The mass of text on the cover lists all the things people say about women writers. “She didn’t write it. She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. She wrote it and she had help. She wrote it, but she is an anomaly.” And so on. These are also all the things that have been said about Ferrante.

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