The Ferrante Letters : An Experiment in Collective Criticism Hardback

by Sarah Chihaya, Merve (Los Angeles Review Of Books) Emre, Katherine Hill, Juno Jill Richards

Part of the Literature Now series

Hardback

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Description

Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferranteâ€™s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world.

Inspired by Ferranteâ€™s intense depiction of female friendship and womenâ€™s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferranteâ€™s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club.

Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authorsâ€™ lives outside the academy.

The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism.

A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.