Meanwhile, Ferrante’s Neapolitan series will be turned into a play in London next winter.
Bronwen Dickey, the author of the new book Pit Bull, talks to The Rumpus about the racism that drove the anti-pitbull movement. When Dickey asked people about their feelings on the dog breed for her book, the answers she received were often filled with underlying racism. “So many people would say … ‘Those people want them to be macho,’ ‘those people get them and just abandon them,’ ‘those people get them because they want to intimidate other people,’” said Dickey. “The tendency to justify things like bans that are not based in science sometimes causes people to scramble for this other rhetoric that’s really ugly and unfortunate.”
At the Paris Review Daily, Evan Kindley and Joanna Neborsky discuss their new books about questionnaires. Kindley’s volume traces the history of the form, while Neborsky’s is an illustrated edition of the “Proust questionnaire.” The two authors ask each other questions from Proust’s famous list of queries, which, it turns out, actually had very little to do with the author: As Kindley notes, Proust didn’t create or promote the quiz (though he did fill one out as a teenager).