Magnificent Octopus

My adolescence as a reader became, without a break, a long and unhappy apprenticeship as an author. The geese have returned. They've bro...

The time of my adolescence is slow, made up of large gray blocks and sudden humps of color, green or red or purple. The blocks don't hav...

I began to sweat. I was squeezed between two old women who stared straight ahead with an unnatural rigidity. One held her purse tight under ...

I found Troubling Love , by Elena Ferrante, to be something of a troubling novel, on several levels. It's Ferrante's first novel. ...

The 2016 Nobel prize in literature will be announced Thursday, October 13. New Republic gives a rundown of who's in the running, in f...

"Each of us narrates our life as it suits us." I am Elena Ferrante. To be clear, I am not actually Elena Ferrante. I mean, I am ...

"To write, you have to want something to survive you. I don't even have the desires to live, I've never had it strongly the way...

Those words had an unpleasant effect on me. As if she were giving dispassionate advice, she was suggesting that I separate also from my thir...

I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I'm incapable of violent reactions, I fear them, I prefer to be still, cu...

We said nothing concrete, I still have those letters [...]. We focused, let's say, on a book he had read, on an article of interest for ...

It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the...

On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on tho...

Thus she returned to the theme of "before," but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn't know anythin...

"I'm dead, but I'm fine." Dead inside, she means. Or maybe just dead to some people in particular. I found The Lost Daug...

The Days of Abandonment , by Elena Ferrante, was an absolutely devastating book. It made me thoroughly miserable and I wallowed in it. I...

I spent the warm months of early autmumn sitting on a bench in the rocky garden, writing. In appearance they were notes for a possible book,...