Before Ferrante: Ann Goldstein and Judith Thurman with Dayna Tortorici on Alba de Céspedes’ There’s No Turning Back

Join renowned translator Ann Goldstein — who introduced American readers to Elena Ferrante — with National Book Award winner Judith Thurman in conversation with Dayna Tortorici, coeditor in chief of n+1, on Goldstein’s new English translation of Italian novelist Alba de Céspedes’ brilliant debut, There’s No Turning Back.

Before Elena Ferrante, there was Alba de Céspedes. Banned in her native Italy during Mussolini’s fascist regime, Céspedes — along with Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morrante, and a cadre of other radical Italian women whose writing has found a passionate new readership in recent years — is a crucial influence for three generations of writers across the world, including Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Jhumpa Lahiri, and countless others.

Céspedes’ debut novel There’s No Turning Back is a coming-of-age story that is as relevant today as it was nearly 90 years ago — following eight women attending college together in Rome with interwoven motivations, dreams, and secrets, it was considered revolutionary when it was first published. Now, this classic novel is available to English-speaking readers for the first time in a magnificent new translation by Ann Goldstein.

In a special conversation, hear Goldstein, Thurman, and Tortorici on what made Céspedes, and her generation, electrifying for the Italian writers who wrote in her wake, the social and political forces that nearly silenced her, the art of bringing There’s No Turning Back into English, why the novel remains profoundly relevant today, and much more.

“One of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers.” — Jhumpa Lahiri

“Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe.” — Annie Ernaux