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“... having that wish respected. What’s interesting is that he was allowed his refusal. The case of Elena Ferrante is, or was, a little like that of Pynchon. She made the choice simply to write her books while saying no to all the other side of it. As she put it in an interview, ‘I have not chosen anonymity. My books are signed. Rather, I have withdrawn ...”

“... determined not to lose it, she loses it, she gets herself back together: that’s the plot of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002). Olga, the narrator, a mother and stalled writer who’s 38 at the time of these events, knows that words like ‘angry’ are often used to diminish and dismiss legitimate grievances, and understands the ...”

“... Elena Ferrante’s narrator, Olga, whose husband has left her, is too wrapped up in her own misery to remember, really, that other people exist. But there is one figure from her Neapolitan childhood she can’t forget: a neighbour, a bustling matriarch of the old school with large skirts and a clutch of nurtured offspring ...”

“... Are​ Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels even books? I began to doubt it when I talked about them with other people – mostly women. We returned to life too quickly as we spoke: who was your Lila, the childhood friend who effortlessly dazzled everyone? Or – a question not happily answered – were you Lila? S ...”

“... three times, or is a sex freak, or stabs people at parties. The cry BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHO ELENA FERRANTE IS, EXCEPT FOR THOSE OF US WHO LOOKED UP HER REAL ESTATE RECORDS! is met from me only with the words: ‘Thank God.’ I am tired of knowing who people are. All that is necessary to know about ...”

“... ideas and feelings – could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value,’ Elena Ferrante – whoever that is – told a Norwegian journalist in 2015. Ferrante has mentioned Morante several times as one of her favourite writers, and may even have chosen her own pen name for the ...”

“... Oates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of Books did? Or how much Martin Amis drinks these days, and where? These scenarios seem unlikely. But perhaps they keep a file on Toni Morrison, who – as a photo that recently went viral made ...”

“... outed (or claimed to be outing) the writer of the Neapolitan novels concealed behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Has the press – or anyone else – any moral right to do this? Is an author’s identity an aspect of her personal privacy, to be disclosed or withheld as she chooses? Or is it information which belongs as much in the public domain as the ...”

“... cashing in. He takes novels with him to ‘rail’ between Postmates tasks. His notes on Bolaño, Elena Ferrante and Tao Lin, as well as various rappers and podcasts, are dispersed through the text, but they’re less notable for their insights than as an index of Sean’s persistent attempts at self-education and self-understanding, in a life that has ...”

“... heavies like Infinite Jest and Underworld and 2666, the multi-volume massifs by Hilary Mantel, Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Did it matter that Means (with his wife) was the dedicatee of one of the most celebrated megaliths of the past quarter-century, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? Of course not. Or that Means had worried, not ...”

“... Fleur Jaeggy really is Fleur Jaeggy, an actual single human being, self-identical. Unlike, say, Elena Ferrante, about whom so many people aren’t sure. There are other ways in which Jaeggy is a kind of anti-Ferrante. The sprawling mess of all those intertangled working-class families, the ‘dissolving ...”

“... over the ‘smoothly global’, untranslatable felicities over windy width – and Elena Ferrante over Kamila Shamsie? In the end, a case was being made for well-written, vital, challenging literature, full of sharp local particularities, wherever it turns up in the world; and so there was inevitably something a bit random about the ...”

“... and cheese’ or ‘a European novel on the nightstand that filled me with bleach and fret’ (Elena Ferrante is my tip for that). ‘I put on,’ she says, ‘my don’t-fuck-with-me face.’ Groff’s characters are generally on the defensive, even when not under attack: they can be relied on to know their way to the nearest sharp object, even in ...”

“... in a safely padded space. But increasingly people are bored by this padding, by the rules that, as Elena Ferrante has put it, demand ‘a measuring stick, a calendar’ inserted between ‘you and the facts, the emotion to be narrated’. (‘That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction,’ Nelson muses, after she and Harry get ...”

“... language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when transplanted. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won startling numbers of readers in the translations ...”