**A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER ** **A BEST BOOK OF 2022 ( *Air Mail* ) ** **Four new and revelatory essays by the author of *My Brilliant Friend* and *The Lost Daughter*.** In 2020, Claire Luchette in *O, The Oprah Magazine* described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as “an oracle among authors.” Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of “bad language” and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women’s truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others. Here is a subtle yet candid book by “one of the great novelists of our time” about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins. **“Everyone should read everything with Elena Ferrante’s name on it.”** — *The Boston Globe*