Reviews"Clear, elegant writing ... Readers will find both emotional and intellectual resonance in Hustvedt's deeply personal essays." -- Publishers Weekly "As accomplished and intelligent as the author's fiction--which is saying a lot." -- Kirkus Reviews, "Clear, elegant writing ... Readers will find both emotional and intellectual resonance in Hustvedt's deeply personal essays."-- Publishers Weekly "As accomplished and intelligent as the author's fiction-which is saying a lot."-- Kirkus Reviews, Clear, elegant writing ... Readers will find both emotional and intellectual resonance in Hustvedt's deeply personal essays.
TitleLeadingA
Dewey Decimal814/.54
Table Of ContentYonder A Plea for Eros Franklin Pangborn: An Apologia Eight Days in a Corset Being a Man Leaving Your Mother Living with Strangers 9/11, or One Year Later The Bostonians : Personal and Impersonal Words Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self
SynopsisFrom the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers. Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James--with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.