Their visual formula isn’t exactly “hideous,” as some readers claim, but it’s certainly tired, and not a little silly: Looking at a Ferrante or Weiner cover, it’s easy to conclude that no woman in their fiction has ever lived inland, or so much as looked directly at a camera. Weiner’s covers, like Ferrante’s, have a high frequency of ocean horizons and women with their backs turned. Her covers are reminiscent of books by Jennifer Weiner, the reigning queen of pop romance who last year clashed with Jonathan Franzen over the fact that genre fiction by men has long been deemed more worthy critical attention than genre fiction by women. It’s also true that “chick-lit” that has cast a long, pastel shadow over Ferrante and her readers. paperbacks look a lot like “chick-lit,” the favored slight for disparaging commercial, female-authored fiction. But to despise the covers-and, by extension, the kind of novel they evoke-in the name of good literature is to buy into the destructive stigma that has long been attached to “women’s fiction” as a genre. ” The complaints are so numerous that Ferrante’s publisher even expressed concern to Slate that “many people didn’t understand the game we we’re playing, that of, let’s say, dressing an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity.” Certainly, readers aren’t required to enjoy the cloying sensibility of the images just because they’re intentionally bad, and because Ferrante herself chose them.

Her covers, by contrast, have earned comparisons to “$4 romance book found in an American gas station. Since the publisher Europa released the first book, My Brilliant Friend, in 2012, the series has sold over a million copies in the U.S. The Neapolitan novels, as the Italian author’s beloved tetralogy is called, chronicle the friendship between two ambitious young women over the course of 50 years and some 1500 pages.

Neapolitan novels order