In the Paris Review’s interview with Elena Ferrante—the first-ever interview with the writer in person—Ferrante describes the crisis of confidence she experienced while working on The Days of Abandonment: “The hand was the same, the writing was the same, there was the same choice of vocabulary, same syntax, same punctuation, and yet the tone had become false. For months I felt that the preceding pages were beyond my abilities, and now I no longer felt equal to my own work. It made me bitter. You’d rather lose yourself than find yourself, I thought. Then everything started up again. But even today I don’t dare reread the book. I’m afraid that the last part has only the appearance of good writing.”
Jenna Wortham, who covers tech for the New York Times, thinks something is changing in our experience of technology: “There’s a slow collective awakening happening right now. With the Sony email leaks, the message is that you should never email something you don’t want other people to potentially read. Other countries have been faster to realize that the notion of privacy is not as ironclad as we like to believe or tend to think. Nothing is actually private. Nothing is actually secure.”
Gawker offers to buy the New York Daily News for $5000.
Ursula K. Le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro are in a dust-up over his new novel, The Buried Giant. At the Times, Ishiguro asked: “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? . . . Will they say this is fantasy?” “Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?” Le Guin responded. “It appears that the author takes the word for an insult. To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.”
A new edition of the Trollope novel The Duke’s Children restores 65,000 words cut from the 1880 edition.