Announcing My Brilliant Ferrante: a community reading & reflection series for Women in Translation Month

Join me in reading Elena Ferrante for the month of August

Jun 26, 2025

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Reading and writing can be lonely pursuits. Most of us do them both alone, which can further isolate those among us who tend to lean introverted. But we don’t have to do these nourishing, enriching acts alone; we can be in community as we read and write about books and how they move us.

To mitigate this particular flavor of solitude, I invite you to join me during Women in Translation Month (August) to read, study, and celebrate one of the most brilliant authors of today.

Elena Ferrante is the pseudonymous author of The Neapolitan Quartet and several standalone novels. If The Neapolitan Quartet doesn’t ring a bell for you, My Brilliant Friend might. It’s the name of the first book in the quartet, as well as the name of the four-season adaptation on HBO.

For the month of August, we will be celebrating Elena Ferrante in two capacities so you can join in any way that suits you.

We’ll be doing a month-long read of the first book in the Neapolitan series, My Brilliant Friend. I’ll be sending out weekly dispatches interrogating motifs and distilling messaging from each of the four sections we’ll be reading.
For those who have already read My Brilliant Friend and don’t feel like a re-read, we’ll also be focusing on four of Ferrante’s standalone novels, one each week of August.

📚 My Brilliant Ferrante Reading Schedules 📚

Track One | My Brilliant Friend:

Week One: Pages 1 — 85
Week Two: Pages 89 — 172
Week Three: Pages 172 — 256
Week Four: Pages 256 — the end.

Track Two | Standalone Book Reading Schedule:

Week One: The Days of Abandonment (188 pages)
Week Two: The Lying Life of Adults (328 pages) |
Books on GIF
will be reading this along with us this week and sharing a review on 8/17!
Week Three: The Lost Daughter (140 pages)
Week Four: Troubling Love (139 pages)

I will be sticking to the regular schedule for The Underlined, which is Thursday mornings. Both tracks will be in the same email so you won’t be getting anything extra in your inbox.

📝 Share your essays 📝

Last October,

Petya K. Grady

got readers excited about Joan Didion with The Joan Didion Group Project. Writers from all over read Didion and wrote responses to her work. I wrote about Didion’s essay called On Carrying a Notebook, and my writeup was featured alongside a few other essays in

Substack

’s weekly newsletter. It was a great experience to collectively read someone so iconic and to see so many essays written by people who apprehended her work differently.

Like The Joan Didion Group Project Petya rallied, this is an experience for the reading community. If you write about any of the books we are reading in August, send me a link to your finished pieces. Each Thursday when my email goes out, I will include links to your contributions to My Brilliant Ferrante.

🙏🏼 No Ferrante without Goldstein 🙏🏼

We can’t do a month of Elena Ferrante without addressing the woman who plays a pivotal role in allowing all of us English speakers to read her: Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s famed translator.

Here is a thoughtful post about translation by

Lit Girl

in which she touches on the role of the translator. She says, “The relationship between Ferrante and Goldstein occurs on the page, one trusting the other to deliver her prose to the English-speaking world with the thin sheet of anonymity hanging between them.”

For English speaking readers, there is no Ferrante without Goldstein. So when we dedicate a month to Elena Ferrante, it must be said that we are also dedicating a month to her translator, without whom our beloved author wouldn’t be the famed person she is today. So Ann, if you’re reading this (HAHAHA), grazie mille.

📖 Order your books! 📖

If you’re planning to participate, be sure to order your books now. Request them from the library or buy them from your favorite indie bookstore or order them from Bookshop.org. All the books we’ll be reading can be found on Bookshop.org here.

I made a printable bookmark with the reading schedules to keep you on track: