A provocative, wildly funny, intellectually rigorous and engrossing novel, punctuated by Siri Hustvedt's own illustrations - a tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers. Fresh from Minnesota and hungry for all New York has to offer, twenty-three-year-old S.H. embarks on a year that proves both exhilarating and frightening - from bruising encounters with men to the increasingly ominous monologues of the woman next door. Forty years on, those pivotal months come back to vibrant life when S.H. discovers the notebook in which she recorded her adventures alongside drafts of a novel. Measuring what she remembers against what she wrote, she regards her younger self with curiosity and often amusement. Anger too, for how much has really changed in a world where the female presidential candidate is called an abomination?

A trail-blazing and inspiring collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience and psychology featuring The Delusions of Certainty, winner of the European Essay Prize 2019. As well as being a prize-winning, bestselling novelist, Siri Hustvedt is widely regarded as a leading thinker in the fields of neurology, feminism, art criticism and philosophy. She believes passionately that art and science are too often kept separate and that conversations across disciplines are vital to increasing our knowledge of the human mind and body, how they connect and how we think, feel and see. The essays in this volume - all written between 2011 and 2015 - are in three parts. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women brings together penetrating pieces on particular artists and writers such as Picasso, Kiefer and Susan Sontag as well as essays investigating the biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general. The Delusions of Certainty is an essay about the mind/body problem, showing how this age-old philosophical puzzle has shaped contemporary debates on many subjects and how every discipline is coloured by what lies beyond argument-desire, belief, and the imagination. The essays in the final section, What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition, tackle such elusive neurological disorders as synesthesia and hysteria. Drawing on research in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology and psychiatry, this section also contains a profound consideration of suicide and a towering reconsideration of Kierkegaard. Together they form an extremely stimulating, thoughtful, wide-ranging exploration of some of the fundamental questions about human beings and the human condition, delivered with Siri Hustvedt's customary lucidity, vivacity and infectiously questioning intelligence.

"Walking between these figures feels like an interruption; being a spectator is itself a performance. They seem to know more than we do, about the status of being an artwork and the place of the viewer. The joke, if there is one, is on us." - The Guardian Munoz's revolutionary oeuvre creates emotional and evocative narratives through sculpture, installation, drawing, writing, and sound. Situating viewers between his work and amongst each other, he creates an intimacy between works of art and viewers. Munoz thought deeply about art history and in particular the tradition of Spanish painting. Before his untimely death at the age of forty-eight, he produced an extensive, powerfully evocative body of work that uniquely explores the narrative and philosophical possibilities of art. Published on the occasion of the two-floor exhibition at David Zwirner in New York in 2022, this catalogue provides an expansive overview of Munoz's career from the 1980s onwards. In an accompanying text, art historian and curator Guillaume Kientz contextualizes Munoz's influences within the art-historical canon. Acclaimed writer Siri Hustvedt writes a thoughtful response to the artist's iconic Conversation Piece. In an imagined interview between Munoz and himself, Maurizio Cattelan further propels the artist's artistic momentum and potential in the time before his death. Also featured is a never-before-published interview between Munoz and the art historian Michael Brenson that took place in 2000, less than one year prior to his untimely death.

'Dizzyingly flexible, deeply human, often funny, it blasts aside our preconceptions and urges us to see the world as it is' i Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in Siri Hustvedt's most personal essay collection yet, a scintillating and profound exploration of motherhood, the maternal and misogyny. Ranging across artistic mothers such as Jane Austen and Louise Bourgeois, psychoanalysis, science, literature and ethnography, this is a polymath's journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art. Fierce, moving and witty, it warns against drawing hard and fast borders where none exist. 'The voice is consistent, combining assured erudition with more playful questioning, always thoughtful and capable of surprising shifts of register and even genre' Lara Feigel, Guardian

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Defiantly complex and frequently dazzling' Sunday Times 'Siri Hustvedt's most ambitious, most rewarding novel. It mesmerises, arouses, disturbs' Salman Rushdie 'Superb . . . What I Loved is a rare thing, a page turner written at full intellectual stretch, serious but witty, large-minded and morally engaged' New York Times Book Review 'A love story with the grip and suspense of a thriller' Times Literary Supplement In 1975 art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a New York gallery. He buys the work, tracks down its creator, Bill Wechsler, and the two men embark on a life-long friendship. This is the story of their intense and troubled relationship, of the women in their lives and their work, of art and hysteria, love and seduction and their sons - born the same year but whose lives take very different paths. 'A big, wide, sensuous novel - clever, sinister, yet attractively real' Guardian PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT: 'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie 'One of our finest novelists' Oliver Sacks 'Reading a Hustvedt novel is like consuming the best of David Lynch' Financial Times 'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post 'A 21st-century Virginia Woolf' Literary Review

Lily Dahl is a heroine of the old school: tough, beautiful and brave. A nineteen-year-old waitress and aspiring actress living in Webster, Minnesota, she becomes enchanted by an exotic outsider - an artist from New York. Drawn into a world of erotic adventure, she finds herself the target of mysterious acts of madness as she strains against the confines of small town life.

After their father's funeral, Erik and Inga Davidsen find a cryptic letter from an unknown woman among his papers, dating from his adolescence in rural Minnesota during the Depression. Returning to his psychiatric practice in New York, Erik sets about reading his father's memoir, hoping to discover the man he never fully understood. At the same time, another woman enters Erik's lonely, divorced life - a beautiful Jamaican who moves into his garden flat with her small daughter. As Erik gets drawn into the cat-and-mouse tactics of someone who appears to be stalking her, he finds out that his sister Inga is also being threatened, by a journalist in possession of a wounding secret from her past. A multi-layered novel that probes the mysteries of the heart and mind, THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN is compulsive, thought-provoking and profoundly affecting.

""And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of" The Awful Truth"? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."" Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of "The Summer Without Men," ""has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a "pause." This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia's release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people's home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her--her mother and her close friends,"the Five Swans," and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband--and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.

From the internationally bestselling author of "What I Loved "comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

Iris Vegan, a graduate student living alone and impoverished in New York, encounters four strong characters who fascinate and in different ways subordinate her: an inscrutable urban recluse who employs her to record the possessions of a murdered woman; a photographer whose eerie portrait of Iris takes on a life of its own; an old woman in hospital who tries to claim a remnant of the ailing Iris; and a professor she has an affair with. An exploration of female identity in an age when the old definitions - as some man's daughter/wife/mother - no longer apply, fuelled with eroticism and a sense of menace.

Hailed by "The Washington Post" as "Siri Hustvedt's best novel yet, an electrifying work," "The Blazing World" is one of the best-reviewed books of the season: a masterful novel about perception, prejudice, desire, and one woman's struggle to be seen.
In a new novel called "searingly fresh... A Nabokovian cat's crade" on the cover of "The New York Times Book Review," the internationally bestselling author tells the provocative story of artist Harriet Burden, who, after years of having her work ignored, ignites an explosive scandal in New York's art world when she recruits three young men to present her creations as their own. Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by the third man, Rune. Many critics side with him, and Burden and Rune find themselves in a charged and dangerous game, one that ends in his bizarre death.
An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle presented as a collection of texts, including Harriet's journals, assembled after her death, this "glorious mashup of storytelling and scholarship" ("The Boston Globe") unfolds from multiple perspectives as Harriet's critics, fans, family, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of where the truth lies. Writing in "Slate," Katie Roiphe declared it "a spectacularly good read...feminism in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" or Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" richly complex, densely psychological, dazzlingly nuanced."
"Astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing" (NPR), Hustvedt's new novel is "Blazing indeed: ...with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity"("Kirkus Reviews," starred review). It is a masterpiece that will be remembered for years to come.

A stunning collection of essays by the author of WHAT I LOVED, in which she addresses many of the themes explored in her novels - identity, sexual attraction, relationships, family, mental illness, the power of the imagination, a sense of belonging and mortality. In three cases, she focuses on the novels of other writers - Dickens, James and Fitzgerald. She also refers to her own novels, affording an unusual insight into their creation. Whatever her topic, her approach is unaffected, intimate and conversational, inviting us both to share her thoughts and reflect on our own views and ideas.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 The artist Harriet Burden, furious at the lack of attention paid her by the New York art world, conducts an experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts in a series of exhibitions. Their success seems to prove her point, but there's a sting in the tail - when she unmasks herself, not everyone believes her. Then her last collaborator meets a bizarre end. In this mesmerising tour de force, Burden's story emerges after her death through a variety of sources, including her (not entirely reliable) journals and the testimonies of her children, lover and a dear friend. Each account is different, however, and the mysteries multiply.

By the bestselling author of WHAT I LOVED, an intimate and enlightening account of her search for the key to her mysterious nervous disorder, which brilliantly illuminates the connection between mind and body. 'Readers of Oliver Sacks will rate this book highly; as with Sacks, scientific knowledge and a powerful capacity for empathy are closely linked . . . It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.' HILARY MANTEL, Guardian While speaking at a memorial event for her father, the novelist Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Was it triggered by nerves, emotion - or something else entirely? In this profoundly thought-provoking and revealing book, Hustvedt takes the reader on her journey through psychiatry, philosophy, neuroscience and medical history in search of a diagnosis. Conveying the often frightening mysteries of illness, she illuminates the perennially mysterious connection between mind and body and what we mean by 'I'.

FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WHAT I LOVED AND A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN 'Richly intelligent insights on every page' Financial Times 'A rare kind of quiet intellectual confidence' Sunday Telegraph In these fascinating, lively and engaging essays, Siri Hustvedt shows what lies behind her fiction: an abiding curiosity about who we are and how we got that way. Covering a wide range of subjects, from the nature of desire to false memories and the paintings of Goya, she draws on her own life and on the insights provided by both the arts and sciences to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human - to live, think and look. 'There is something refreshingly straightforward about her style. It has the confidence born of complex but well digested thoughts' Observer PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT: 'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie 'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear' Hilary Mantel 'Her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist . . . in this regard I feel that she resembles Virginia Woolf ' Observer 'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post

Taking as its point of departure the meeting of two artists at a tumultuous moment in the 1980s, "Almodovar's Gaze" explores how the photographic and filmmaking lens can fruitfully overlap. American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar (born 1949) first met in Madrid in 1984, when the photographer was there on a visit occasioned by his first exhibition in the city. Mapplethorpe was already an accomplished artist, 38 years old and sure of himself and his sensibility. Pedro Almodovar was a well-known filmmaker in the Spanish underground, and the best-known international representative of the Madrid-based countercultural Movida movement that arose after General Franco's death in 1975. Mapplethorpe and Almodovar had gone out partying in Madrid, which at the time was particularly receptive to young artists closer to the underground than to the establishment. The later impact that Mapplethorpe's retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art had on Almodovar in 1987 was tremendous. This intimate arrangement of Mapplethorpe's seductive and powerful images was carefully selected by Almodovar from over 1,700 of Mapplethorpe's photographs.

In this unique neurological memoir, Siri Hustvedt attempts to solve her own mysterious condition

While speaking at a memorial event for her father in 2006, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Despite her flapping arms and shaking legs, she continued to speak clearly and was able to finish her speech. It was as if she had suddenly become two people: a calm orator and a shuddering wreck. Then the seizures happened again and again. "The Shaking Woman" tracks Hustvedt's search for a diagnosis, one that takes her inside the thought processes of several scientific disciplines, each one of which offers a distinct perspective on her paroxysms but no ready solution. Ultimately, her quest to understand her own mysterious troubles becomes "a brilliant illumination for us all" (George Makari, author of "Revolution in Mind").

"What I Loved "begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a life-long friendship.

Leo's story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the growing involvement between his family and Bill's--an intricate constellation of attachments that includes the two men, their wives, Erica and Violet, and their sons, Matthew and Mark.

The families live in the same New York apartment building, rent a house together in the summers and keep up a lively exchange of ideas about life and art, but the bonds between them are tested, first by sudden tragedy, and then by a monstrous duplicity that slowly comes to the surface.

A beautifully written novel that combines the intimacy of a family saga with the suspense of a thriller, "What I Loved "is a deeply moving story about art, love, loss, and betrayal.