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For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New
Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing
towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves.
Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life, examining
twelve family photographs to construct a memoir from camera-caught
moments, each of which pose questions of their own. She begins with
the picture of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague at
the age of five in 1939. From there we follow her to the Czech
enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist
and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois
family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the
ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to
evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination
with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a
composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escaped
the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later,
Malcolm delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of
William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led her to
become a character in her own drama. Displaying the sharp wit and
astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume
develops into a memoir like no other.
In Reading Chekhov Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary
critic, biographer and journalist. Her close readings of Chekhov's
stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from his life and
framed by an account of a recent journey she made to St Petersburg.
Malcolm demonstrates how the shadow of death that hovered over most
of Chekhov's literary career - he became consumptive in his
twenties and died in his forties - is almost everywhere reflected
in the work. She writes of his childhood, his relationship with his
family, his marriage, his travels, his early success, his exile to
Yalta - always with an eye to connecting them to his themes and
characters.
The process known as psychoanalysis is sometimes revered, sometimes
derided, and most often misunderstood. What good does it do? Can it
help anyone? What risks does it pose to both patient and analyst?
None of these questions can be easily answered, but in Janet
Malcolm's narrative, in which all her skills as a reporter and
interviewer come into play, their complexity is limpidly revealed.
Selected essays from America's foremost literary journalist and
essayist, featuring ruminations on writers and artists as diverse
as Edith Wharton, Diane Arbus and the Bloomsbury Group. This
charismatic and penetrating collection includes Malcolm's now
iconic essay about the painter David Salle.
'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to
notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally
indefensible'In equal measure famous and infamous, Janet Malcolm's
book charts the true story of a lawsuit between Jeffrey MacDonald,
a convicted murderer, and Joe McGinniss, the author of a book about
the crime. Lauded as one of the Modern Libraries "100 Best Works of
Nonfiction", The Journalist and the Murderer is fascinating and
controversial, a contemporary classic of reportage.
Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her
marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In The Silent
Woman, renowned writer Janet Malcolm examines the biographies of
Sylvia Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's Bitter
Fame, to discover how Plath became an enigma in literary history.
The Silent Woman is a brilliant, elegantly reasoned inquiry into
the nature of biography, dispelling our innocence as readers, as
well as shedding a light onto why Plath's legend continues to exert
such a hold on our imaginations.
Who will inherit the secrets of Sigmund Freud? Who will protect his
reputation? Who may destroy it? Janet Malcolm's investigation into
the personalities who clash over Freud's legacy has become a
celebrated story of seduction and betrayal, love and hatred,
fantasy and reality. It is both a comedy and a tragedy. Malcolm's
cast of characters includes K. R. Eissler, a venerable
psychoanalyst and keeper of the Freud flame; Jeffrey Mason, a
flamboyant Sanskrit scholar and virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter
Swales, a former assistant to the Rolling Stones and indefatigable
researcher. Each of them thinks they know the truth about Freud,
and each needs the help of the other. Malcolm endeavours to
untangle the causes of their rivalry and soured friendships, while
the flaws and mysteries of Freud's early work tower in the
background.
Through an intensive study of "Aaron Green," a Freudian analyst in New York City, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm reveals the inner workings of psychoanalysis.
For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New
Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing
towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves.
Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life, examining
twelve family photographs to construct a memoir from camera-caught
moments, each of which pose questions of their own. She begins with
the picture of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague at
the age of five in 1939. From there we follow her to the Czech
enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist
and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois
family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the
ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to
evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination
with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a
composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escaped
the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later,
Malcolm delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of
William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led her to
become a character in her own drama. Displaying the sharp wit and
astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume
develops into a memoir like no other.
"Includes an afterword by the author"
"In the Freud Archives" tells the story of an unlikely encounter
among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of
psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless
forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned
virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous
thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and
self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are
the Sigmund Freud Archives--founded, headed, and jealously guarded
by Eissler--whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the
community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold.
Janet Malcolm's fascinating book first appeared some twenty years
ago, when it was immediately recognized as a rare and remarkable
work of nonfiction. A story of infatuation and disappointment,
betrayal and revenge, "In the Freud Archives" is essentially a
comedy. But the powerful presence of Freud himself and the harsh
bracing air of his ideas about unconscious life hover over the
narrative and give it a tragic dimension.
A young woman struggles to assert herself within a regrettable
marriage. A boy learns about life on an epic summer's journey to a
new school. A doctor attempts to befriend his most interesting
patient. A young man tries to figure out the best way to live. This
riverrun edition presents a selection of Chekhov's longer stories -
novellas, effectively - in Constance Garnett's timeless
translations. These four stories, Ward No.6, The Wife, The Steppe
and My Life, tell of characters attempting to create meaning
through work, connection with others and art; they deal with
misunderstandings and loss; they celebrate brief joys, sudden
passions and unsatisfied longings, all underscored by Chekhov's
gentle wit and great humanity. This unique collection - selected
and introduced by the celebrated Janet Malcolm - is unmissable for
the enthusiast and a brilliant introduction to one of the
nineteenth century's greatest writers.
Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography: the
story of the mystifying relationship between the brilliant and
affable Gertrude Stein and her brooding companion, Alice B. Toklas
"Janet Malcolm deftly captures Alice B. Toklas's legendary 40-year
partnership with the brilliant modernist Gertrude Stein in Two
Lives, clearing up a few mysteries along the way-including how two
Jewish women were able to survive World War II in their provincial
French chateau with the help of a Vichy collaborator."-Vogue
"Shrewd, humane, and beautifully written."- John Gross, Wall Street
Journal "How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the
Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary
work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair,
of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master "whose charm was
as conspicuous as her fatness" and "thin, plain, tense, sour" Alice
B. Toklas, the "worker bee" who ministered to Stein's needs
throughout their forty-year expatriate "marriage." As Malcolm
pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in
Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of
biographical truth. "The instability of human knowledge is one of
our few certainties," she writes. The portrait of the legendary
couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two
world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled
by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm
learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Two Lives is also a
work of literary criticism. "Even the most hermetic of [Stein's]
writings are works of submerged autobiography," Malcolm writes.
"The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need
a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of
anteroom of suggestion." Whether unpacking the accessible
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein "solves the koan
of autobiography," or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a
masterwork of "magisterial disorder," Malcolm is stunningly
perceptive. Praise for the author: "[Janet Malcolm] is among the
most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn
epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."-David Lehman,
Boston Globe "Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so
trenchantly about the strange art of biography."-Christopher Benfey
A married woman restlessly seeks a deeper love. An insomniac
ponders the meagreness of his life. A man loses the respect of his
family because of a counterfeit coin. A duel of wits escalates into
a clash of cultures - and more. The Duel and Other Stories is the
second in an exclusive three-volume edition of Chekhov's stories.
Encompassing the intricacy and range of social connection, these
exquisitely crafted stories trace the mutability of our everyday
relationships as they stall, separate or entwine. In the strangely
lyrical deadpan prose so characteristic of Chekhov's drama, they
expose the misplaced affections, broken vows, and brilliant dreams
of what it is to be human. This unique collection offers a perfect
introduction to one of Russia's - and the world's - greatest
writers.
Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the
Murderer, as well as her biographies of 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 become a dazzling portrait of an artist. "She is among the
most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in
The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into
explosions of insight." Forty-one False Starts brings together for
the first time essays published over the course of several decades
(many from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that
reflect Malcolm's preoccupation with artists and their work. Her
subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She
explores the "dominating passion" of Bloomsbury to create things
visual and literary, the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward
Weston's nudes, and the psyche of the German photographer Thomas
Struth. She delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's
fiction, appreciates the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels,
and confronts the false starts of her own autobiography. As Ian
Frazier writes in the introduction, "Over and over Malcolm has
demonstrated that an article in a magazine-something we see every
day-can rise to the highest level of literature."
"[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth." --The New York Times Book Review
The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant exposé of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted.
An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also a story with an unconventional heroine. McGough is a zealous defense lawyer duped by a white-collar con man; a woman who lives, at the age of 54, with her parents; a journalistic subject who frustrates her interviewer with her maddening literal-mindedness. Spirited, illuminating, delightfully detailed, The Crime of Sheila McGough is both a dazzling work of journalism and a searching meditation on character and the law.
The Purloined Clinic is a retrospective of essays, reviews, and reports that reflect the range and depth of Janet Malcolm's engagement with psychology, criticism, art, and literature.
She examines aspects of "that absurdist collaboration," the psychoanalytic dialogue, from which come "small, stray sell recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions...that no other human relationship could survive." She addresses such subjects as Tom Wolfe's vendetta against modern architecture, Milan Kundera's literary experiments, and Vaclav Havel's prison letters. She explores the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague, guides us through the labyrinthine New York art world of the eighties, and takes us behind the one-way mirror of Salvador Minuchin's school of family therapy.And to each subject she brings the incisive skepticism and dazzling epigrammatic style that are her hallmarks.
Through an intensive study of 'Aaron Green, ' a Freudian analyst in
New York City, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm reveals the inner
workings of psychoanalysis
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