Our Brilliant Friends: After Dinner Book Club and Watch Party
Virtual Event
An exclusive reading(opens in a new tab) from Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults(opens in a new tab) will be followed by a conversation between three renowned translators and the Comma Queen herself, Mary Norris, moderated by Michael Reynolds of Europa Editions.
Norris joins National Book Award and Booker Prize-winning translator Jennifer Croft (Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, author of Homesick), translator Sam Bett (Yukio Mishima’s Star, Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs), and Elena Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein to talk language, linguistics, translation, International literature, and the enduring international success of Elena Ferrante.
Stay after the reading and discussion in our virtual “living Zoom” as we watch My Brilliant Friend episode 6, “The Rage.”
This event is hosted by Europa Editions(opens in a new tab) in partnership with Community Bookstore(opens in a new tab), Skylight Books(opens in a new tab), Solid State Books(opens in a new tab), The Center for the Art of Translation, and Words Without Borders(opens in a new tab).
Suggested donation $5 (but please donate as much as you can or as little as you can spare. It’s for a very good cause!).
All proceeds will benefit the #SaveIndieBookstores(opens in a new tab) campaign, which was launched last week with the support of James Patterson, Reese’s Book Club, the American Booksellers Association, and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.
All participants who donate will receive two free ebooks (which will be sent via email after the event): A Girl Returned(opens in a new tab) by Donatella di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions, and My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump and published by Two Lines Press.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick, and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize). In 2023, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband and twins.
Sam Bett (b. 1986) is a writer and a translator. His translation of Yukio Mishima’s Star (New Directions, 2019) won the 2019/2020 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With David Boyd, he is co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami for Europa Editions. (Photo credit: Eskil Vestre)
Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. She received a PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award and was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She has translated works by Elena Ferrante—including the bestselling Neapolitan Novels—, Pier Palo Passolini, Alessandro Baricco, and many others. She is currently editing the complete works of Primo Levi, for which she received a Guggenheim Translation fellowship.
Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and was a query proofreader at the magazine for twenty-four years. She has written for The Talk of the Town and for newyorker.com, on topics ranging from her cousin Dennis Kucinich to mud wrestling in Rockaway. She is best known for her pieces on pencils and punctuation. She is the author of “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” and “Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen.”
Michael Reynolds is editor in chief at Europa Editions. He is the author of a collection of short stories entitled Sunday Special, and a book for young readers entitled La notte di Q and illustrated by Brad Holland. He is the editor of 1989, an anthology of ten European writers illustrated by Henning Wagenberth. For Europa Editions his translations include three volumes in Carlo Lucarelli’s De Luca series, children’s fiction by Wolf Erlbruch and Altan, and Daniele Mastrogiacomo’s Days of Fear.