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But I don’t think that these superficial delights, redolent though they are of the standard practices and conventions of what some critics might brush off as mere pleasure reading, are at all the things that generate the most intense pleasure in reading Ferrante—at least, not for me. No, the strang…

the surprise comes in the bathetic letdown of their failures

The Story of the Lost Child is no manifesto. Who would want it to be? It is the story that an imposter might write, knowing herself to be one. An upstart’s novel, of bad mothers and bad feminists, bad politicos, of the kind of self-regard necessary to close oneself off in a room of one’s own and …

When the four of us began this whole enterprise, we met in person to talk about our projections and anxieties about writing together. Over pasta and wine, we worried about the idea of reading books together, long-term: What if we all came up with the same ideas? How would we distinguish our voices …

[...] Lila is the most clearly defined character at various points, yet she is also the most willing to embrace phase changes and transformations, at once the most and least solid of forms. Thus, both her magical changeability and her lifelong nightmare of slowly dissolving margins—perhaps migraine…