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The Library Is Open

A blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses. Every book gets a gay rating.

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Tag: Italy

Review: The Story Of A New Name by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This second instalment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet deepens and complicates the themes of the first.

Classics, Fiction, Italy, Novel

Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

A potent depiction of friendship.

Contemporary, Fiction, Italy, Novel

Review: The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

An ambitious novel about war and memory.

1930s, Ethiopia, Fiction, Historical, Italy, Novel, War

Review: The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James

A novel that does what it says, painting a portrait of an ambitious and charming young woman as she seeks to experience all life has to offer.

America, Classics, England, Henry James, Italy

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The second of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels picks up immediately where the first left off, back at the wedding of the brilliant Lila Cerullo to grocer and neighbourhood businessman Stefano Carracci. What follows is a more sprawling but also more contained story, following Lila and narrator Lenu through Lila’s marriage and Lenu’s studies in their early twenties.
Ali Smith is done. At the beginning of this *cough* companion piece to her recent Seasonal Quartet, narrator and artist Sand is bummed out and in isolation, even bored with puns and wordplay (Ali Smith without puns and wordplay!?). It’s 2021 in the UK and lockdown is over but people are still dying by the hundreds.
This collection of blistering poetry takes the term to ‘take care’ and finds violence hidden inside. Eunice Andrada investigates ‘taking’ in all its forms: patriarchy and misogyny, capitalism and globalisation, ecocide and colonisation.
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