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
Mother Tongue
“Or again, does a ‘newsagent’ really need to become a ‘news dealer,’ a ‘flyover’ an ‘overpass,’ a ‘parcel’ a ‘package,’ or in certain circumstances ‘between’ ‘among’ and ‘like’ ‘such as’?” How to sound American.
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A literary magazine best served cold.
Break out your book of grudges because River Styx literary magazine has decided on the theme for their next issue: Revenge.
“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Ben Lerner has a story [subscription required] in this week’s New Yorker that, like his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, features a protagonist named The Author. The magazine interviewed Lerner about the invitation to blur his fiction with his autobiography. He says that his work in an exercise in “activating those questions in peculiar ways—but the questions, not the answers, are what strike me as interesting.”
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The Economist and the Poet
The Economist has a nice interview with Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi. In it, he discusses the role of poetry in modern society, and how it’s still “something people perversely do.”
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