“... 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 ...”

“... of thousands of copies and become a literary sensation, on the order of Roberto Bolaño or Elena Ferrante (both also somewhat autobiographical, it should be added). So the more satisfactory response would be to take a poll (preferably worldwide) and find out what its readers think. I believe the result would be that they cannot tell you whether ...”

“... whether that invisibility is absolute (B. Traven), relative (Thomas Pynchon) or precarious (Elena Ferrante), but there has to be a readership in place first. These days self-promotion, the business of presenting to the world your trauma or cheekbones (ideally both), is not optional, as real-life examples can prove: Mountains of the Moon, an ...”

“... her 1997 rhapsody, Zeroes + Ones.More recently, ‘the manifesto of Donna Haraway’ was listed by Elena Ferrante as one of the three books that has most influenced her as a writer (the other two were Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti by the philosopher Adriana Cavarero, and Elsa Morante’s House of Liars).* Lenu’s 1970s, gobbling her way through ...”

“... she thought her mother and father had with each other. They became ‘the two inseparables’. (Elena Ferrante mentions the protagonist of The Days of Abandonment reading Beauvoir’s late novella The Woman Destroyed; but, to me, Zaza and Simone could be foresisters of Lila and Lenù of the Neapolitan quartet.) After a day at Meyrignac eating apples ...”