Introduction: Collective Criticism
I. Letters (2015)
My Brilliant Friend
The Story of a New Name
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The Story of the Lost Child
II. Essays (2018)
Unform, by Sarah Chihaya
The Story of a Fiction, by Katherine Hill
The Queer Counterfactual, by Jill Richards
The Cage of Authorship, by Merve Emre
Afterword
Appendix: Guest Letters, by Sara Marcus, Marissa Brostoff, Lili
Loofbourow, Cecily Swanson, and Amy Schiller
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Sarah Chihaya is assistant professor of English at Princeton University.
Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. Her most recent book is The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018).
Katherine Hill is assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. She is the author of the novels The Violet Hour (2013) and A Short Move (2020).
Jill Richards is assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University. She is the author of The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (2020).
With fiery insight and feminist spirit, they have written a fitting
companion to Ferrante’s books.
*Booklist (starred review)*
The intimate tone lends a beguiling humanity to the book, inducing
a pleasure more often associated with novels: the pleasure of
character.
*New Yorker*
A truly innovative approach to understanding the author-reader
connection made all the more compelling for having one of the 20th
century's greatest literary works at its core.
*Library Journal*
The combination of intellectual rigor and personal reaction makes
this fascinating reading for Ferrante fans.
*Publishers Weekly*
If The Ferrante Letters is meant to be an experiment in what would
happen if boundaries, forms, and the shape of literary criticism
were to dissolve and the opinions of critics blurred into one
another, it is one that the authors recognize as both an exciting
and frightening possibility.
*New Republic*
The Ferrante Letters gives us a unique opportunity to read—or
reread—the Neapolitan novels with four distinct guides beside us,
both literary and personal, posing questions and offering insights,
analysis, and discussion that enrich and deepen our experience of
the books.
*Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan
novels*
The Ferrante Letters is a smart, beautiful, often moving meditation
on the experience of reading the Neapolitan Quartet. This
collection of letters and essays deftly manages that tricky balance
of the creative, the critical, and the personal. A magnificent
accomplishment.
*Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift: A Novel*
These four smart feminist critics reflect on the Neapolitan novels'
exploration of women's friendship, intellectual labor, and personal
lives. Reading The Ferrante Letters feels like you have stumbled
upon your favorite reading group talking about your favorite
author. It captures the way critical thinking should work, not in
isolation but in conversation.
*Pamela Thurschwell, University of Sussex*
In The Ferrante Letters, expertise and passion dovetail to great
effect. This absorptive, idiosyncratic book is a work of collective
criticism that offers a set of rigorous, convivial, and stylish
readings of its primary texts, staging the critical act as also a
creative one. This book reveals that the form literary criticism
takes is as important as its content.
*Sarah Blackwood, author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing
Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States*
While it is primarily Ferrante devotees who will find this book
most intriguing, those interested in alternative modes of critical
inquiry should take a look as well. A sharp and lively book for
fans and scholars.
*Kirkus Reviews*
This book is a must-read for anyone who loves Elena Ferrante and
for anyone who wants to think about new directions in literary
criticism.
*Bookriot*
If you are new at the Ferrante's world this one will be a great
introduction...Highly recommended.
*Il Feminile*
The Ferrante Letters is a bold, often inspiring attempt to rethink
literary criticism and teaching practices on a collective basis,
bridging the personal, critical and pleasurable.
*Times Higher Education*
I would heartily recommend The Ferrante Letters to fellow Ferrante
fans, to feminist scholars, to readers interested in collective
critical experiments.
*Times Literary Supplement*
What Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards have created might cater
more to the cultivated reader of Ferrante than the scholar, yet
academics stand to learn much from as daring and novel a form of
criticism as this one.
*World Literature Today*
The Ferrante Letters is extremely absorbing. It’s rare to come
across university-nurtured criticism, informed by theory, that is
jargon-free and studded with insight.
*Virginia Quarterly Review*
I was thoroughly compelled by the rigor and candor with which
Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards explore the intimacies that
readers create through and with novels—and by their readiness in
The Ferrante Letters to put their own reading lives under the
microscope while they do so. I want to continue to read with these
four critics, jointly and severally. They certainly should be your
companions as well, dear readers, the next time all of us,
severally or jointly, read Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet.
*Novel: A Forum on Fiction*
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