Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey - Hardcover

"It is an intimate history of her progress between one book and the next; an invitation to sit at her desk and to see as she sees the work she does with words." --Times Literary Supplement

"This is a fascinating volume, as ever beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein. At times, it is as absorbing as Ferrante's extraordinary fictions and touches on troubling unconscious matter with the same visceral intensity. For those who can't wait for the next Ferrante fiction to sink into, it provides a stopgap." --The Guardian

"The book, exquisitely translated by Ann Goldstein of The New Yorker, opens a window on to the life of one of the most mysterious writers at work in Italy today." --Evening Standard

"In Frantumaglia, Ferrante asserts the most fundamental and important truth of who she is: that she is someone who will do only as she will, and nothing else. That is what is at stake for all women. And the stakes, as Ferrante knows, have never been higher." --New Republic

"In her own exceedingly quotable words, drawing on myth, theory, philosophy, and, of course, literature, the author reveals herself in her multitudes: she is kind and good-humored, self-deprecating and apologetic, flinty and unwavering... While this collection will be most enticing to those already reading Ferrante, it's also a feast for writers, lovers of literature, and creators of all kinds." --Booklist

"Rendering real women, with their fraught relationships and anger, joy, anxieties, disappointment and sadness, has always been where Ferrante is at her most authentic; where she is her most truthful. But in Frantmuaglia, her first work of non-fiction, the reader finds one of Ferrante s most convincing works of fiction: Elena Ferrante."--The Muse

"Cumulatively these fragments offer fascinating insights into Ferrante's working methods and artistic purpose."--Ruth Scurr,The Times Literary Supplement

"Her one-off pieces (many of them previously unpublished), about subjects including an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad short story and how Flaubert shaped her conception of France, are thoughtful and suggest acute self-editing." --New Statesman

"The writing is as sensitive, intimate, intelligent and beautiful as any of her novels." --The Arts Desk

"On every page of Frantumaglia, Ferrante speaks as the enemy of convention, unafraid of the difficulty of discovering new feminine specificities." --LA Review of Books

"Ferrante's work is not about women or friendship or abandonment: It is, rather, about a sense of the deep-down rawness of life itself - which runs like an electrical current beneath the prose - and it is responsible for the thousands of pages of writing she has sent out into a world of readers hungry to feel alive to their own perilous condition." --The Nation

"Now, American readers hungry for every Ferrante sentence they can get will find many here in which she lowers her knife through the bread of life with the same startling force as she does in her novels." --LA Times

"Over the decades of interviews in Frantumaglia, a portrait emerges if not of the artist herself, then of Elena Ferrante's writing process and aim: to give order to the frantumaglia, however provisional, and arrive at a literary truth through story." --Hazlitt

"This extraordinary collection of frantumaglia gives us far greater insight into her novels than any speculation about her 'real' identity." --Readings

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter. Her Neapolitan novels include My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child.