At the Guardian, Elena Ferrante gave a rare interview to booksellers and translators and discussed her newest book, The Lying Life of Adults, as well as her acclaimed Neopolitan Novels. “Going away is important but not decisive,” she says. “Lenù goes away, Lila never abandons Naples, but they both develop, their lives are full of events. As I’ve said, I feel close to Elena’s choices. We don’t have to fear change, what is other shouldn’t frighten us. But staying doesn’t seem wrong to me; what’s essential is that our ‘I’ not be impoverished if we should confine ourselves to a space forever. I like people who are able to have bold adventures just going from one end to the other of the street where they were born. I imagined Lila like that.”
Elena Ferrante on Bold Adventures, Both Near and Far
27 letters
Here’s a letter that no longer finds itself at home in our alphabet, & yet we use it everyday.
Girl Prodigies
Millions contributor Michelle Dean wrote for The New Yorker‘s Page Turner about Opal Whiteley, whose childhood diary–written when she was six on scraps of paper–was published over 100 years ago to meet with acclaim, then controversy, and then obscurity. If girl prodigies interest you as much as they do me, you’ll also love this 2010 piece from Lapham’s Quarterly, on Barbara Newhall Follett.
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Celebrating America’s Birthday
It was America’s birthday this week. Celebrate with quintessential American fiction, according to the rest of the world (via LitHub). More of a poetry person? We search for the great American epic.
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Bound
“Think the kennel partner was a man? Think he was, in Braverman’s telling, threatened by her success? You are correct. There are so many stories like this, in Double Bind, of ambition built up and then put in its place: the high school classmate who sneered to Roxane Gay, when he learned that she’d been accepted to Yale when he had not, ‘affirmative action.'”
Lorin Stein Named Editor of the Paris Review
Garth recently posited that Dave Eggers would be a great, if counter-intuitive, replacement for Philip Gourevitch at the Paris Review. Instead, the Paris Review has announced today the equally admirable appointment of FSG editor Lorin Stein to head up the venerable literary magazine. The announcement.