Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers - Brossura

Malcolm, Janet

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0374534586 ISBN 13: 9780374534585

Casa editrice: FSG Adult, 2014

Riassunto

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism

A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics.

Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction--as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman inThe Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."

Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely inThe New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visualand literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction--a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day--can rise to the highest level of literature."

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

Su questo libro

Recensione:

No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm . . . Her -influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage. --Katie Roiphe, The Paris Review[A] master of the profile...alluring, pointed, singularly perceptive tellings. --The New Yorker Forty-One False Starts [is] a powerfully distinctive and very entertaining literary experience. . . what the reader remembers is Janet Malcolm: her cool intelligence, her psychoanalytic knack for noticing and her talent for withdrawing in order to let her subjects hang themselves with their own words. . .These short pieces [are] unmistakably the work of a master. --Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Forty-One False Starts is a remarkable and, in its strange way, gripping piece of work. It achieves the rare feat of communication something valuable about the largely ineffable 'creative process. --Zoe Heller, The New York Review of Books [An] invigorating new collection . . . keenly intelligent journalism that feels, always, as if it had been written by a human being, one with a beating heart, a moral compass, a wide-ranging curiosity, and a point of view. --Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe Even if you've been reading Janet Malcolm for years, the critical appreciations collected in Forty-One False Starts may surprise you. The title essay is (or pretends to be) a series of scrapped beginnings to her profile of the painter David Salle, a giant of the art world in vulnerable mid-career. If you want to write magazine prose, this alone should make you buy the book. Ranging from Bloomsbury to Edward Weston to J.D. Salinger, the entire book is full of stylistic daring, fine distinctions, and bold judgments set down at the speed of thought.Lorin Stein, The Paris Review online --Various

L'autore:

Janet Malcolm is the acclaimed author of many books, including In the Freud Archives;The Journalist and the Murderer; Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial;Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (for which she received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography); andBurdock, a volume of her photographs of a "rank weed." Malcolm writes frequently forThe New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: FSG Adult
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0374534586
• ISBN 13: 9780374534585
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 316