A scene of reading found early in My Brilliant Friend, the opening novel in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, seems to have supplied Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards with the model for the “experiment in collective criticism” they stage in The Ferrante Letters, a book in which they mean, ambitiously, to lay down “first a procedure and then the beginning of a tradition” (3). When Ferrante has her first-person narrator, Lenù Greco, recall how she and another neighborhood girl, Lila Cerullo, near the end of their final year of primary school, bonded through their impassioned reading of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, the novelist invites her readers to equate friendship with shared reading and conversation about reading. The Ferrante Letters, a collective project of “reading and writing about women reading and writing” (2), also tells a story about friendship, one it interweaves with reflections on Ferrante's fiction and feminism. Hence the pages that its afterword devotes to reassuring readers that the affiliations on which the book was founded endure: as of 2018, we're told, the four literature scholars who became one another's correspondents three years before continue to be involved in one another's lives, personally and professionally.Yet in one significant way Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards depart from the model they derive from Ferrante's work. Within My Brilliant Friend this scene of joint reading emblematizes a childhood that is being consigned to the past even as we read about it. As Lenù’s schooling continues, Lila's ends, and Lila begins working in the family business, that seductive image of intellectual intimacy soon collapses. The girls' dialogue continues, it is life-long, but their increasingly diverging relations to books become so many demonstrations of how each is going it alone. When Ferrante and her narrator, Lenù, remind the reader of the charismatic figure that Little Women's Jo March cuts as she scribbles alone in her attic and apart from her sisters, they enroll themselves, too, in the tradition of the kunstlerroman—a story tracking reflexively the formation of the artist who has become accomplished enough to create this story, and a story that thereby naturalizes the concepts of individuated authorial voice and privatized authorial property that make going it alone and writing alone seem the acme of accomplishment. By the time we finish Ferrante's fourth novel, The Story of the Lost Child, Lenù, now the celebrated author “Elena Greco,” has published a successful novel, her third, in which she has remade for her own (possibly parasitic) ends the story of her brilliant friend. (At the same time, the crucial question animating the quartet—the question whether Lenù’s books would actually stand up in comparison to those hypothetical volumes that Lila might have authored herself had she been permitted to continue her education—remains unanswered and probably unanswerable. Lenù, suffering from impostor syndrome, nevertheless poses it often.)Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards, however, have reservations about Lenù’s desire for recognition, about authorship modeled on the kunstlerroman's lines, and about the publication of books, or more precisely, of books that, like Lenù’s and Ferrante's own, are presented as the discourse of a single speaker. They present their project of collective authorship as an alternative to the individualism—not to mention the résumé building—that is part and parcel of the progress narrative in which Lenù has been enrolled.By routing their consideration of Ferrante's fiction through the letters they emailed to one another over the summer of 2015, Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards mean to contest the hegemony of single, solitary authorship—of the notion that writing occurs “in a sealed chamber of individual genius” (101)—and mean to challenge accordingly the norms of production and accreditation that organize the biblio-culture of literary studies. With its corrosive portrait of masculine academic ambition, Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, it is worth recalling, itself critiques those norms—particularly through the later novels' account of Pietro Airota, Lenù’s classicist ex-husband, whose strategies for evading his childcare responsibilities and getting his books written Lenù records with some asperity as autobiographical narrator.Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards do not let readers forget that dissent from the academy's bibliographic norms has real costs. Hence the asides, peppering these pages, that acknowledge ruefully that The Ferrante Letters will not count as anybody's “tenure book.” Those raise an important question for our discipline. Exactly why does the book by a single author remain the default vehicle for the pursuit of a critical vocation? As an alternative, Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards have conjured into being a new kind of scholarly object.Thinking about literature happens in conversation, they insist (11). In itself that proposition is uncontroversial. Many practitioners of literary studies believe that with our monographs' acknowledgements pages and footnotes we are avowing our debts to dialogue—registering the intersubjective conditions under which our ideas have come to be. Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards, however, as their introduction explains, want to make more visible what scholarly writing owes to the practices of togetherness and conviviality that by convention it relegates to its margins.This introduction declares a more familiar form of scholarly collaboration—the edited collection of critical essays—inadequate to that goal: a judgment about mode and method that feels all the more consequential when one recalls how crucial the anthology form was for academic feminism during its formative decade of the 1980s. Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards also eschew joint authorship. The sole section of The Ferrante Letters that is cowritten is in fact their introduction. Cowriting, they argue there (while reluctantly doing it), is not an effective way to mount a collectivist resistance to the standardized forms of professional success. Though the two groups are equally skeptical about the monograph, there is accordingly a notable contrast between the project of these four writers and that of the twenty-two authors who cooperated in the recent “multigraph” Interacting with Print (2018). The latter group set out to carry forward the social writing of the Enlightenment and so contest the academy's privileging of competition and individual accountability: those goals, they decided, entailed their shedding their proper names in favor of the shared authorial alias “The Multigraph Collective.” The Ferrante “letters” by contrast are all signed: “Merve”; “Love,//Jill” (114); or, more elaborately, “Bursting from my borders,// Katherine” (78); or “Sarah . . . if that's even my real name” (73; a signature that references, of course, Ferrante's own playful pseudonymity). True, the boundaries between the four writers' respective readings of Ferrante's novels are by design “permeable” (3): Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards associate the epistolary structure of address with “expectations of vigorous citation and intertextuality” (3). However, their introduction explains that the appeal of the letter form for them lies, in addition, in the letter collection's capacity to accommodate—as first-person plural discourse, with its misleading unitariness, would not—the discontinuities among their styles and their habits of thinking and feeling: they want autobiographically inflected criticism, because they want to reveal “the seams where life and criticism meet” (11), but they want it in a mode that extends beyond the single, solitary author. This introduction also associates their embrace of epistolary method with their commitment to friendship, which for them is defined by “its productive conflict, its necessary individuation” (7). Friendship, and not the love between women idealized in 1980s feminist collaborations (6), is the kind of togetherness The Ferrante Letters values—intellectual and emotional bondedness, but not convergence.Their choice of the letter form has additional motivations. As though reviving the epistolary fictions of the eighteenth century, they opted for letters, they explain, the better to make thinking dovetail with feeling, sense with sensibility, and critical work with amateur leisure. They also opt for the letter form the better to pursue what Chihaya calls a “slow-form criticism” (18). That writing to the moment that was the lot of epistolary heroines might, they insinuate in intriguing asides that I wish they had developed, enable criticism to do better justice to the novel as an experience of duration—and do better justice to narrative middles, that phase in first-time readers' experience of a narrative, which Jill Richards describes beautifully, when they do not yet know how things end (185).Theorists of epistolarity sometimes propose that letters, which are defined by responsiveness and reciprocation, which always point outward toward the multi-authorial networks in which they circulate, are constitutively at odds with unities of the bound book. The Americanist William Merrill Decker argues, for instance, that even the letters of a single-author volume, in so far as they are addressed to others, can perplex our convictions about the individuality of the individual life. Such arguments have an important bearing on the experiment in collectivism staged by The Ferrante Letters. Its correspondents, however, could have been readier to reflect on letters as letters and on the entailments and effects of the epistolary mode. There is much more that they could have said, for instance, about letters' difference from “conversation”; or about what performing, or simulating, private exchange in front of a broad audience might actually entail; or about the awful way the characters in the Neapolitan Quartet tend to treat other people's mail when they intercept it—a dimension of Ferrante's fiction that might have reminded them of the envy, hurt, and sense of being shut out that epistolary dialogues can create among the third parties they exclude.One explanation for those omissions might involve the rather surprising way in which, for most of its second half, The Ferrante Letters abandons the epistolary form that it vindicated in its introduction. It is something of a letdown how, from pages 123 through 223, their project appears before us as that rather more familiar sort of scholarly object, a collection of critical essays: one essay each for the four letter writers. Those essays are followed by an appendix that presents the “guest letters,” written by others, that were addressed to Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards as their blog postings appeared—an arrangement whose downside is how it forces the perplexed reader to rewind back to the beginning of the quartet. When it is read cover to cover, in the linear fashion enjoined on book reviewers, The Ferrante Letters feels a trifle padded and disjointed.The writers' readiness to abandon their experiment with epistolary method was for me the more disappointing, because an unexpected pleasure of The Ferrante Letters turned out to be how well this collective's program of formal innovation illuminates the formal innovations of Ferrante's stories about brilliant friends. I came away from The Ferrante Letters with, for instance, a new appreciation of Ferrante's strategies for reinventing the bildungsroman and kunstlerroman. One finds here compelling insights into how both Lenù’s story and the story of the books that Lenù publishes are shadowed, hauntingly, by counterfactual possibilities: by a story about a composite “Lenù-and-Lila” that eludes formalization and by a story about Lila's unwritten books.All four critics are jointly and severally insightful, too, about Ferrante's capacity to rivet her readers and sensitive in tracing what that sometimes unpleasant-feeling state of rivetedness might imply both for feminism (traditionally centered on autonomy, not enthrallment) and for criticism (generally conceptualized as pivoting on detachment, not immersion). Susceptible to bouts of Ferrante fever myself, I appreciated the attention here to the formal structures Ferrante employs to produce this sense of personal connection and overattachment. What may be most interesting here, though, is how even as, by acknowledging these reading experiences, they invite their audience to identify their project with current post-critical approaches, as modeled by Rita Felski's investigations of “art and attachment” in Hooked (2020), for instance, or with current vindications of amateur reading practices like those assembled in Aarthi Vaade and Saikat Majumdar's The Critic as Amateur (2019), they ultimately position their project at a remove from such work. They do so in part through their recurring references to how unpleasurable that feeling of being riveted by Ferrante's/Lenù’s ungainly narrative can sometimes be (100, 126, 135). They do so, most importantly, whenever they address head-on the question of whether friendship is a good framework in which to understand readers' relation to texts. Sarah Chihaya's probing essay, from the book's second half, on the un-pleasure generated by Ferrante's breaking of literary forms takes on that question. She aligns to wonderful effect what it means to have an adult friendship and what it means to have an adult relationship with a beloved book. Either way, some pushback, some breakage, must happen, in which we turn away from the object or other person who earlier formed us; that is where both maturity and critical reading begin (145–49). This is marvelous.But this was a hard review to write. Whether because I belong to a more buttoned-up generation of critics, or because I didn't want you, dear readers, to feel relegated to reading over somebody else's shoulders, I finally decided, after much to-and-fro, against framing my review as a letter to the four authors. I have been second-guessing that decision; likewise my decision to refer to the authors as Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards, instead of taking my cue from their letters and presenting myself as being on a first-name basis with Sarah, Merve, Katherine, and Jill. (For the record, we have never met.) Does that reluctance to present myself as their pen pal mark me as unfriendly? I wonder. Witness, too, my fretful response to the passage in the afterword in which, imagining how their collective's methodological experiment might be reiterated and found “a tradition” (3), Chihaya (Sarah) recommends that we who have been reading their letters should strive in our turn to find our own “true correspondents”; “open your conversations to the world” (227). This peroration, which I found a bit preachy, simultaneously put me on the defensive. I already do this, I felt like protesting: I already have brilliant friends with whom I correspond and converse. Check my acknowledgments pages, I felt like saying.But the question of whether or not the present review or reviewer is unfriendly isn't in the end altogether relevant, I hope. To assess a reviewer's bona fides in those terms, I would propose, might even be a category error. I can say that I was thoroughly compelled by the rigor and candor with which Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards explore the intimacies that readers create through and with novels—and by their readiness in The Ferrante Letters to put their own reading lives under the microscope while they do so. I want to continue to read with these four critics, jointly and severally. They certainly should be your companions as well, dear readers, the next time all of us, severally or jointly, read Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet.