Celebrating Elena Ferrante with Ann Goldstein, Ferrante's translator, and Michael Reynolds, Editor in Chief of Europa

With over 10 million copies of her Neapolitan novels sold in over 50 countries, Elena Ferrante is a global literary sensation. Her new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, was released on September 1st. Set in Naples, like My Brilliant Friend, and told through the eyes of a young girl, The Lying Life of Adults is a book of transformations. A singular portrayal of emerging selfhood, but also a fresco of the city of Naples in its many guises. Change, transformation, fluidity, flux, division and reconciliation, submergence and emergence, metamorphosis: these themes are as central to Ferrante’s new book as they are to our own restless age.

We are excited to welcome Ann Goldstein, Ferrante's translator, and Michael Reynolds, Editor in Chief of Europa Editions, Ferrante's US publisher in a virtual conversation.

This is a ticketed event. The $28.00 ticket includes a copy of The Lying Life of Adults. which you can pick up curbside (We will send you an email when the book is ready for pickup) or have shipped to you via USMail, tax, and the virtual Zoom event.

Ann Goldstein didn’t start learning Italian until the age of thirty-seven. She arranged classes with her fellow New Yorker copy department colleagues, spending a year studying grammar before reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Since then, as well as an illustrious career at the New Yorker (editing the likes of John Updike and Janet Malcolm) Goldstein has become one of the world’s most sought-after translators of Italian fiction, working on books by Primo Levi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and most famously, Elena Ferrante.

Goldstein has been translating the works of the superstar novelist Elena Ferrante - who has thus far kept her real identity hidden - since 2004, beginning with Days of Abandonment.

The publication of the new Ferrante novel, The Lying Life of Adults, is among the year’s biggest literary events, and Ann Goldstein is your perfect guide.

Michael Reynolds is the editor-in-chief of independent publisher Europa Editions. He is the recipient of the 2016 Golden Colophon Award for Superlative Achievement & Leadership in Independent Literary Publishing, awarded by the Community of Literary and Magazine Presses, and a 2017 Epiphany Magazine Honoree for Publishing Excellence. Prizewinning and bestselling authors Michael has worked with at Europa include Alina Bronsky, Amelie Nothomb, Elena Ferrante, Chantel Acevedo, Domenico Starnone, Charlotte Wood, Julie Lekstrom Himes, Hiromi Kawakami, Nick Arvin, and Alexander Maksik. He is also an author and translator whose published translations include three historical mysteries by Carlo Lucarelli and Viola Di Grado’s prizewinning novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool. Michael was born in Australia and now lives in New York.

Europa Editions is a small, independently owned book publisher of upmarket fiction, literary nonfiction, and high-end mysteries. In relative commercial terms, publishers like Europa inhabit a small corner of the market, but in cultural terms we remain highly relevant not only to the culture of reading but also in the broader cultural, social, and political landscape.

From the New York Times review of The Lying Life of Adults: “Ferrante’s women go so spectacularly to pieces that it is easy to forget that the vast majority of her novels have, if not happy endings, then notes of reconciliation. Her women come through the fire because they are writers; the act of narration becomes an act of mending.”—Parul Sehgal

Hear Ann Goldstein reading an excerpt from The Lying Life of Adults here.

Enjoy an exclusive multilingual reading from The Lying Life of Adults and a celebration of the translator’s craft.

On June 23, Elena Ferrante’s international publishers and translators, celebrity super fans, Ferrante’s English translator Ann Goldstein, and some of Ferrante’s most erudite commentators gathered to discuss the art of translation, Ferrante’s work, the worldwide success of her Neapolitan quartet, and the author’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults.

Elena Ferrante’s “star translator” Ann Goldstein was joined by novelist, biographer, and short-story writer Roxana Robinson; author and academic Merve Emre; comparative literature professor and Ferrante scholar Tiziana de Rogatis; and author and Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett.

See the video of the event here.