Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are being adapted for television. The thirty-two part TV series will cover all four books and be directed by Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo. Shooting will begin in Italy this year, with the show set to arrive in late 2018. There is no word yet about an American distributor for the program.
At The Week, Lili Loofbourow tells “the tangled tale of two Italian literary giants”: Ferrante and Domenico Starnone. Starnone is married to Anita Raja, the author and translator who was outed last year as the writer behind Ferrante’s books. With his new novel, Ties, Starnone takes up a story that resembles that of Ferrante’s 2002 book, Days of Abandonment—both are about the dissolution of a family. As Loofbourow writes, “Starnone’s novel—which tells a remarkably similar story, but from the point of view of the husband and one of the kids—feels like a deliberate counterpoint. What would happen if the family Ferrante broke apart were to be unhappily soldered back together? What would happen if Ferrante’s story of the wife were told from the point of view of the husband and daughter instead?”
At Lit Hub, Philippa Snow writes about the “adolescent charm” of poetry by celebrities including James Franco, Kristen Stewart, and Lindsay Lohan.
DNAinfo has purchased the Gothamist network of websites, which cover local stories in five US cities. As the New York Times points out, the merger is likely to cause a culture clash: DNAinfo is owned by staunch conservative Joe Ricketts, while Gothamist, as the Times says, “features snappy writing and reporting on issues that appeal to the left-leaning populations in the cities it covers.” Soon after the sale was announced, negative stories about Ricketts disappeared from Gothamist sites.
Tonight at KGB Bar in Manhattan, André Aciman, Nicole Krauss, Eric Puchner, and Tom McAllister will read as part of the venue’s Behind the Book series.