Praise for Elena Ferrante and "The Neapolitan Novels" "Everyone should read anything with Ferrante's name on it." --The Boston Globe "Ferrante's novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader." --James Wood, "The New Yorker" "One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory." --Megan O'Grady, "Vogue" "Amazing! "My Brilliant Friend" took my breath away. If I were president of the world I would make everyone read this book. It is so honest and right and opens up heart to so much. Reading Ferrante reminded me of that child-like excitement when you can't look up from the page, when your eyes seem to be popping from your head, when you think: I didn't know books could do this!" --Elizabeth Strout, author of "Olive Kitteridge" "Elena Ferrante will blow you away." --Alice Sebold, author of "The Lovely Bones" "Ferrante's emotional and carnal candor are so potent." --Janet Maslin, "The New York Times" "I like the Italian writer, Elena Ferrante, a lot. I've been reading all her work and all about her." -- John Waters, actor and director ""Elena Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force."-- Gwenyth Paltrow "Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you've never heard of"-- "The Economist" "[Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels] don't merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction's richest portraits of a friendship." --John Powers, Fresh Air, "NPR" "Ferrante's freshness has nothing to do with fashion...it is imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history." --"The New York Times Book Review" "Elena Ferrante's THE STORY OF A NEW NAME, book two in her Naples series. Two words. Read it." --Ann Hood, author of "The Obituary Writer" "Ferrante writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency." --Susanna Sonnenberg, author of "Her Last Death: A Memoir" ""The Days of Abandonment" is a powerful, heartrending novel." --Jhumpa Lahiri, author of "The Lowlands" "I am such a fan of Ferrante's work, and have been for quite a while." --Jennifer Gilmore, author of "The Mothers" "No one has a voice quite like Ferrante's. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense...Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are." --John Freeman, "The Australian" "The women's fraught relationship and shifting fortunes are the life forces of the poignant book" -- "Publisher's Weekly" "An engrossing, wildly original contemporary epic about the demonic power of human (and particularly female) creativity checked by the forces of history and society." "-- The Los Angeles Review of Books"