Close

“The Neapolitan Quartet” is a set of novels to which many Americans have been introduced through the HBO series, “My Brilliant Friend”. While the television series does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the books and is well worth the watching, there is nothing that can compare to actually reading Elana Ferrante’s words. I devoured these...

474

Netflix has adapted Elena Ferrante's bestselling novel La vita bugiarda degli adulti (The Lying Life of Adults) into a six-part series set for release on the streaming platform on 4 January 2023. The coming-of-age story, set in Naples in the 1990s, revolves around the young Giovanna who sets out on a quest to meet her estranged aunt Vittoria and un...

973

“Two girls talking about books. They are Rory Gilmore, the protagonist of the TV series Gilmore Girls, and Michelle Obama, the real one. Rory, an avid reader, recommends the first lady an (endless) series of books to read while traveling for the Let Girls Learn initiative. Michelle will choose only one: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante”.  My B...

479

Unless you’ve been living on the moon, you must have heard of My Brilliant Friend, the series of four books by the utterly talented–and mysterious!–Italian writer Elena Ferrante. I still recall the moment I bumped into the first volume of the quartet a few years ago. I was looking for a present for my mother, and the book cover caught my attention....

584

TV production is growing in Italy, where U.S. streamers are gradually raising their investment levels just as pubcaster RAI, which is still the industry’s main driver, is cutting back. According to local TV producers association APA, the Italian market in 2022 will generate more than €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) worth of scripted content resulting i...

1038

Reading Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter for the first time, Maggie Gyllenhaal, who would go on to adapt and direct it in a critically acclaimed, Oscar nominated film, said that Ferrante “was saying things out loud that I knew to be true, but I had never heard said out loud. And I found that both disturbing and comforting, and I thought, in...

736

My Brilliant Friend is coming to an end at HBO. But not quite yet. The WarnerMedia-owned cable network and Italian public broadcaster Rai have renewed the series, which is based on Elena Ferrante’s book series, for a fourth and final season. It comes as the third season, My Brilliant Friend: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, launched in the U.S....

667

Friday April 8, 2022 — 7 p.m. EST. I AM Books, 124 Salem Street, Boston MA (Register Here). Join I AM Books for a conversation between Elena Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein and Europa Editions Editor-in-Chief Michael Reynolds. The series “Libriamo! From Italy with Books” is presented by I AM Books in collaboration with FICC Boston and is under...

501

Elena Ferrante, the doyenne of Italian literature, is renowned for her bestselling Neapolitan quartet and The Lost Daughter, adapted by Maggie Gyllenhaal into an acclaimed film starring Olivia Colman. (Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, including My Brilliant Friend, have sold 4 million copies in North America and over 8 million globally.) With In the...

624

When last we left Elena “Lenù” Greco and Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo at the end of My Brilliant Friend’s second season, these two young ladies—friends since their 1950s girlhood in a rough Naples neighborhood—were headed in such different directions that it seemed they might never meet again. Lila (Gaia Girace), arguably the smarter of the two, had bu...

557