My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Book 1 of the Neapolitan Novels, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, has been named the Best Book of the 21st Century by The New York Times!
To mark the first 25 years of the century, The New York Times Book Review has selected the 100 most influential books of the era, with the help of hundreds of “literary luminaries.”
Authors and literary personalities such as Stephen King, Claudia Rankine, James Patterson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elin Hilderbrand, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Roxane Gay, Marlon James, Sarah MacLean, Min Jin Lee, Jonathan Lethem, and many others, were asked to choose the 10 best books published since 2000.
Three of Elena Ferrante’s novels were included in the Top 100: The Days of Abandoment (#92), The Story of the Lost Child (#80), and My Brilliant Friend (#1).
“The first volume of what would become Ferrante’s riveting four-book series of Neapolitan novels introduced readers to two girls growing up in a poor, violent neighborhood in Naples, Italy: the diligent, dutiful Elena and her charismatic, wilder friend Lila,” writes The New York Times. “From there the book (like the series as a whole) expands as propulsively as the early universe, encompassing ideas about art and politics, class and gender, philosophy and fate... Reading this uncompromising, unforgettable novel is like riding a bike on gravel: It’s gritty and slippery and nerve-racking, all at the same time.”
“One lasting effect of Elena Ferrante’s remarkable novel, My Brilliant Friend, is that it created a shared reading experience for millions of people worldwide,” writes Michael Reynolds, editor in chief of Europa Editions. “Those readers have different tastes, life experiences, challenges, and visions of the world, yet they share this point of contact: cohabitation over 1,600 pages in the Naples of Lila and Lenú.
This reading experience has been accompanied and facilitated all along, since the book’s publication, by a wide-ranging conversation around and about these books. This conversation, no matter its declinations, is not only a testament to the quality of Ferrante’s storytelling and its ability to reach many kinds of readers; it is also a testament to the contribution that booksellers, librarians, critics, and other writers have made to keeping conversation alive and aloft. May we see many more such moments of dialog around books in the future.
My congratulations to Elena Ferrante, her brilliant translator Ann Goldstein, and my colleagues at Europa, past and present, who have done so much over the years to bring this book and others to the attention of readers. And my thanks to the critics, the booksellers, the librarians, the authors, and the readers who keep bibliodiversity thriving and the conversation around books alive.”
