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Yet while The Great Gatsby or A Separate Peace or On the Road—these bro-love tales of masculine exceptionalism—suggest to us that bright-burning human fireworks like this might actually exist somewhere, Ferrante's brilliant friend[s] show[s] us the opposite. Rather, I wonder if Ferrante's point is …

I devoured these books the first time, the way I remember devouring books as a kid, the way Lila does, according to Lend. It was that old feeling, the excitement of having a mind to which another mind is speaking from the page. Rereading them has been remarkably slow—and not just because Sarah enco…

Friendship and reading take time, but I tend to be pushy with both. I'm a voracious, perhaps violent reader of novels, and a voracious (hopefully not violent) cultivator of new friendships; I blaze through books in single sittings and similarly crave those day-into-night, coffee-into-beer conversat…

In Italy, this observation has been crucial to the literary culture of postwar feminism as articulated by Luisa Muraro, one of Ferrante's influences, and the Milan Woman's Bookstore Collective. As Rebecca Falkoff has suggested, Muraro's theory of affidamento, "a practice of 'putting faith in' or 'e…

In her haunting little book Love’s Work, the British philosopher Gillian Rose writes: “In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change…. There is no de…