Jump to navigation Skip to content
“It’s very disconcerting to translate oneself, but it’s a kind of pure contact with the work you make.” In this event welcoming Jhumpa Lahiri as the new Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author reads from her new collection, Roman Stories (Knopf, 2023), translated from the Italian by the author and Todd Portnowitz, and joins Brandon Taylor for a conversation about her work.
The Lying Life of Adults is a television series adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s 2019 coming-of-age novel of the same name. Set in Naples in the 1990s, the six-episode Netflix series follows the adventures of Giovanna, who leaves the suburbs to meet her estranged aunt in the city.
“I believe that the best books aren’t those that entertain us. The best books are those that hurt us.” In this 2018 interview at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, Italian writer Domenico Starnone talks about the pleasure and exhaustion of writing and refers to a letter Kafka wrote about the importance of writing books “that are like an axe that breaks the frozen chest.” Starnone’s novel Trust (Europa Editions, 2021), translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri, is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
