Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism 'Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny' Sunday Times 'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke 'She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be' New Yorker Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated - and mordantly funny.

_______________ 'One of the most inventive, original and disturbing writers of her generation' - Daily Telegraph 'Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... In Gratitude amounts to the inner monologue of a highly intelligent, furiously funny, traumatised woman' - Helen Davies, Sunday Times 'She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or any irrelevant tosh like that, but for writing so well' - Guardian _______________ In August 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given 'two or three years' to live. Being a writer, she decided to write about her experience - and to tell a story she had not yet told: that of being taken in, aged fifteen, by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. Splicing childhood memories with present-day realities, Diski paints an unflinching portrait of two extraordinary writers - Lessing and herself. Jenny Diski died a week after the publication of In Gratitude. A cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid memoir, it is her final masterpiece.

In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay home with the phone off the hook, Jenny Diski takes a trip around the perimeter of the USA by train. Somewhat reluctantly she meets all kinds of characters, all bursting with stories to tell, and finds herself brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape of America, half-known already through film and television. Like the pulse of the train over the rails, the theme of the dying pleasures of smoking thrums through the book, along with reflections on the condition of solitude and the nature of friendship and memories triggered by her past times in psychiatric hospitals Cutting between her troubled teenaged years and contemporary America, the journey becomes a study of strangers, strangeness and estrangement - from oneself, as well as from the world.

'This strange and brilliant book recounts Jenny Diski's journey to Antarctica last year, intercut with another journey into her own heart and soul...a book of dazzling variety, which weaves disquisitions on indolence, truth, inconsistency, ambiguousness, the elephant seal, Shackleton, boredom and over and over again memory, into a sparse narrative, caustic observation and vivid description of the natural world. While Diski's writing is laconic, her images are haunting.' Elspeth Barker, Independent on Sunday

'I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like' EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?) What does Jenny Diski know about animals? She's really not sure. She remembers the animal books she read in her childhood; the cartoons she watched; the meals she ate; the strays she found; the animals who have lived and still live with her. She examines human beings, too, and the way in which we have looked at, studied, treated and written about the non-human creatures with whom we share the planet. Subtle, intelligent and brilliantly observed, What I Don't Know About Animals is an engaging look at what it means to be human - and what it means to be animal.

A brilliant, alternative take on sixties swinging London, Jenny Diski offers radical reconsiderations of the social, political, and personal meaning of that turbulent era.

What was Jenny Diski doing in the sixties? A lot: dropping out, taking drugs, buying clothes, having sex, demonstrating, and spending time in mental hospitals. Now, as Diski herself turns sixty years old, she examines what has been lost in the purple haze of nostalgia and selective memory of that era, what endures, and what has always been the same. From the vantage point of London, she takes stock of the Sexual Revolution, the fashion, the drug culture, and the psychiatric movements and education systems of the day. What she discovers is that the ideas of the sixties often paved the way for their antithesis, and that by confusing liberation and libertarianism, a new kind of radicalism would take over both in the UK and America.
Witty, provocative, and gorgeously written, Jenny Diski promises to feed your head with new insights about everything that was, and "is," the sixties.

'I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like' EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?) Jenny Diski's attempt to keep still and mentally idle resulted in a year in which she travelled to New Zealand, spent two months almost alone in a cottage in the country and visited the Sami people of Lapland. Diski fails to keep still and, like the philosopher Montaigne, keeps a record of her ramblings both mental and physical hoping as he did in time to make her mind ashamed of itself. Interspersed with ill-tempered descriptions of these trips are digressions on the subject of her sore foot; her childhood desire for 'a condition', thoughts about growing older, spiders, fundamentalism and the problems of keeping warm.

Using two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails, taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of reflections and revelation in a unique combination of travelogue and memoir.

What if God fell in love and the person was already married? A bitter story of the very first love triangle between a man, his wife, and their God

First came Adam, whose fall soured His quest for absolute authority, then Noah, whose dreary sense of duty He found dull. God resolves for a third and final time to get it right, to select a vessel through whom He can direct human affairs, and to whom He can communicate directly His will. He chooses a solitary figure whose trust must be wooed, but whose faith, once secured, will surely reflect even greater glory and love. Were matters only that simple. In Only Human, Jenny Diski’s brilliant and affecting retelling of the Abraham and Sarah story, God learns that no man, chosen or not, is solitary, and that the bonds forged by the human heart are resilient even to divine commandment. Diski transforms an archetypal tale of Old Testament obedience into a fierce love triangle, a test of wills over not only mankind’s future, but over who will tell the story of its past.

Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confused relationship between 'father and daughter', old writer/young acolyte, possible lovers, using both their voices. Much of their story is about absence of the people they love. In Jenny Diski's hands it becomes a fascinating tale.