Named the #1 Book of the 21st Century by the New York Times: The "enduring classic" about the lifelong friendship of two women from Naples ( The Atlantic).Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante's four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while ma...

The secular and the pious. The rich and the poor. Those with "a capacity for destiny" and those who "cannot afford it." Emmaus is a world of stark contrasts, one in which four young men—all from proud, struggling families, and all lusting after Andre, a hyper- sexual woman—are goaded from adolescence to manhood in a torrent of exploits and crises, sexual awakenings and morbid depressions, naivety and fatalism.A brilliant portrait of the perils and uncertainties of youth and...

After celebrated author Jasper Gwyn suddenly and publicly announces that he will never write another book, he embarks on a strange new career path as a "copyist," holding thirty-day sittings in a meticulously appointed room and producing, at the end, brief but profoundly rich portraits in prose. The surprising, beautiful, and even frightening results are received with rapture by their subjects—among them Gwyn's devoted assistant, Rebecca; a beautiful fabric importer; a landscape painter; G...

A rediscovered classic from 1935, the Cuban-Italian author’s debut collection of 18 stories brings to life the final years of a bygone world.Convinced that he shares a destiny with the doomed protagonist of a serialized novel, a man begs its author to change the ending.A 15-year-old boy experiences the sweet melancholy of an unrequited first love, as his older cousin prepares for her wedding in the country.A small detail shatters the illusions of a ...

Notorious writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final novel—visionary, phenomenally strange, and unfinished at the time of his brutal murder—tells a fragmentary and characteristically provocative story of an oil executive split between the desire to dominate and the desire to be dominated.Seventeen years after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brutal death, his sprawling, unfinished magnum opus was published in Italy. Petrolio is an extraordinary display of Pasol...

Out running an errand, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse - she buys a shiny black notebook. She starts keeping a diary in secret, recording her concerns about her daughter, the constant churn of the domestic routine and her fears that her husband will discover her new habit. With each entry Valeria plunges deeper into her interior life, uncovering profound dissatisfaction and restlessness. As she finds her own voice, the roles that have come to define her-as wife, as mother, as ...

A moving Italian coming-of-age classic in a new translation by Ann Goldstein, celebrated translator of Elena Ferrante On a remote island in the Bay of Naples, a young boy roams the shore with only his dog for company. Arturo's mother died in childbirth and his wayward father Wilhelm rarely returns to the island. Left in isolation, he dreams up a world of romantic exploits in which his father sails the seas like the heroes in his favourite stories. When Wilhelm suddenly reappears with his n...

Classic stories and reportage set in Naples in the 1940s and 50s that inspired Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels A highly evocative classic set in Italy's most vibrant and turbulent metropolis in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Anna Maria Ortese was one of the most celebrated and original Italian writers of the Twentieth Century. Her stories and reportage, collected in this volume, form a powerful portrait of ordinary lives, both high and low, family dramas, love affairs, and st...

The "stunning conclusion" to the bestselling saga of the fierce lifelong bond between two women, from a gritty Naples childhood through old age ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st CenturyThe Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila, who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy. In this ...

Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by "one of the great novelists of our time" ( The New York Times).In the third book in the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common ...

The young women studying at the Grimaldi yearn for new kinds of life. Monitored by the nuns who run the college, eight of them form a close group, sharing confidences and hopes for the future. But each, too, has her private secrets - a child from an early love affair, frustrated artistic ambitions, burning desires and petty jealousies. With the passing months, their paths begin to diverge, as each woman struggles towards her own idea of freedom.A virtuosic group portrait, There...

**Two stories converge in the aftermath of the devastating 1908 earthquake in Sicily and Calabria: a young woman sees a chance to avoid her impending arranged marriage and a boy manages to escape from the influence of an abusive mother on the verge of madness.This new award-winning novel is from Nadia Terranova, author of Farewell Ghosts, a finalist for the 2019 Premio Strega, and is translated by Ann Goldstein, who also was the translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan qu...