The international bestseller, now in B-format paperback with a brand new cover.

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 laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” (Library Journal). “One of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” —NPR

My Brilliant Friends is a group biography of three women’s friendships forged in second-wave feminism. Poignant and politically charged, the book is a captivating personal account of the complexities of women’s bonds. Nancy K. Miller describes her friendships with three well-known scholars and literary critics: Carolyn Heilbrun, Diane Middlebrook, and Naomi Schor. Their relationships were simultaneously intimate and professional, emotional and intellectual, animated by the ferment of the women’s movement. Friendships like these sustained the generation of women whose entrance into male-dominated professions is still reshaping American society. The stories of their intertwined lives and books embody feminism’s belief in the political importance of personal experience. Reflecting on aging and loss, ambition and rivalry, competition and collaboration, Miller shows why and how friendship’s ties matter in the worlds of work and love. Inspired in part by the portraits of the intensely enmeshed lives in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friends provides a passionate and timely vision of friendship between women.

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 maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women. “An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends.” —Entertainment Weekly “Spectacular.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “Captivating.” —The New Yorker Basis for the HBO series

Unlock the more straightforward side of My Brilliant Friend with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which follows two bright young girls, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, as they navigate their childhood and teenage years in post-war Italy. In spite of Lila’s brilliance, her gender and her family’s poverty mean that, unlike Elena, she is denied the opportunity of an education and must marry at a young age. The novel is a stunning portrait of Italian society and female friendship, with all its tensions and complexities. It is the first of Elena Ferrante’s acclaimed Neapolitan novels, which trace Elena and Lila’s lives until Lila’s unexplained disappearance when the two women are in their sixties. Find out everything you need to know about My Brilliant Friend in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

My Brilliant Friend: by Elena Ferrante | Conversation Starters A Brief Look Inside: Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo live in the same neighborhood and go to the same school, but their paths in life quickly diverge after middle school when Lila drops out. However, they manage to hang on to their friendship. My Brilliant Friend, a book about friendship and the bonds of childhood that can persist despite the many problems that life throws your way, explores female bonding in a patriarchal society. It touches upon the themes of repression of women, male violence, normalization of violence, poverty and its consequences, and the aftermath of World War II on the people as a whole. EVERY GOOD BOOK CONTAINS A WORLD FAR DEEPER than the surface of its pages. The characters and their world come alive, and the characters and its world still live on. Conversation Starters is peppered with questions designed to bring us beneath the surface of the page and invite us into the world that lives on. These questions can be used to... Create Hours of Conversation: • Foster a deeper understanding of the book • Promote an atmosphere of discussion for groups • Assist in the study of the book, either individually or corporately • Explore unseen realms of the book as never seen before Disclaimer: This book you are about to enjoy is an independent resource to supplement the original book, enhancing your experience of My Brilliant Friend. If you have not yet purchased a copy of the original book, please do before purchasing this unofficial Conversation Starters.

While Stella Miles Franklin took on the world, her beloved sister Linda led a short, domestic life as a wife, mother and sister. In a remarkable, genre-bending debut novel Amy Brown thrillingly reimagines those two lives – and her own – to explore and explode the contradictions embedded in brilliant careers and a woman’s place in the world. Sliding Doors meets Wifedom. Stella Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life of travel, art and freedom. Not so her beloved sister Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was an inversion of Stella. A family peacemaker who married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25. In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella – a brilliant alternative vision of My Brilliant Career. Innovative and involving, My Brilliant Sister is an utterly convincing (and hilarious) portrait of Miles Franklin and a moving, nuanced exploration of the balance women still have to strike between careers and family lives. It gives a fresh take on one of Australia’s most celebrated writers and an insight into life now.

Elena Ferrante--named one of the 100 most influential people in 2016 by Time magazine--is best known for her Neapolitan novels, which explore such themes as the complexity of female friendship; the joys and constraints of motherhood; the impact of changing gender roles; the pervasiveness of male violence; the struggle for upward mobility; and the impact of the feminist movement. Ferrante's three novellas encompass similar themes, focusing on moments of extreme tension in women's lives. This study analyzes the integration of political themes and feminist theory in Ferrante's works, including men's entrapment in a sexist script written for them from time immemorial. Her decision to write under a pseudonym is examined, along with speculation that Rome-based translator Anita Raja and her husband Domenico Starnone are coauthors of Ferrante's books.

Is conflict inherent to the politics of borders? Recent global events, erupting from national, religious, class, racial and gender boundaries would suggest it is. From the inhumanity of post-Brexit British immigration policy to the violent suppression of women's freedom in Iran, to Russia's territorial invasion of Ukraine, and most immediately to the violent conflagration engulfing Palestine, border hostilities seem everywhere characterised by fearful and toxic intolerance of what is deemed other. This book examines the writing of award-winning European novelists to suggest an alternative perspective, one that redresses time-sanctioned hierarchies of mind over body, of ideals over physical reality. It explores novelistic representations of power, war, sacrifice, heroism, national history and identity, all issues more conventionally viewed within a male consensus. The fiction offers a cultural and imaginative response to border conflicts of all kinds, ethical, bodily, religious, and geographical, often drawing upon the writers' own personal experience of threatening divisions. Examining works by Virginia Woolf, Jenny Erpenbeck, Olga Tokarczuk, Herta Müller, Anna Burns, Chika Unigwe, Maylis de Kerangal, Magda Szabó, Elena Ferranti, Alki Zei, Elif Shafak, and Oksana Zabuzhko, it uses an integrated interdisciplinary approach to combine literary readings with detailed historical and political understanding of cultural context. Coming from many different cultures and histories, these writers speak a common condemnation of all hierarchies of worth and of exceptionalist identities whether sanctified by religion, nature, or tradition. Morris shows how their stories, read here in translation, also articulate a strikingly unified vision of a radical ecological understanding of human relations based on physical continuity and co-existence rather than borders dividing an idealised 'us' from a denigrated 'them'.

This book is the first dedicated volume of academic analysis on the monumental work of Elena Ferrante, Italy's most well-known contemporary writer. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins brings together the most exciting and innovative research on Ferrante's treatment of the intricacies of women's lives, relationships, struggles, and dilemmas to explore feminist theory in literature; questions of gender in twentieth-century Italy; and the psychological and material elements of marriage, motherhood, and divorce. Including an interview from Ann Goldstein, this volume goes beyond "Ferrante fever" to reveal the complexity and richness of a remarkable oeuvre.