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A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning
writer Vivian Gornick. Vivian Gornick, renowned essayist and
celebrated feminist writer, selects twenty essays out of
thousands that represent the best examples of the form
published the previous year.
For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her
characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have
explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and
personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career,
Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind
Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's
self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick
explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy,
Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the
cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the
characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown
bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print
her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice,
championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the
1970s. Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight,
the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most
beloved critics at her best.
A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love
All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.
Vivian Gornick's relationship with her mother is difficult. At the age of forty-five, she regularly meets her mother for strolls along the streets of Manhattan. Occasionally they'll hit a pleasant stride - fondly recalling a shared nostalgia or chuckling over a mutual disgust - but most often their walks are tinged with contempt, irritation, and rages so white hot her mother will stop strangers on the street and say, 'This is my daughter. She hates me'.
Weaving between their tempestuous present-day jaunts and the author's memories of the past, Gornick traces her lifelong struggle for independence from her mother - from growing up in a blue-collar tenement house in the Bronx in the 1940s, to newlywed grad student, to established journalist - only to discover the many ways in which she is (and always has been) her mother's daughter.
Fierce Attachments is a searingly honest and intimate memoir about coming of age in a big city, and the perpetual bonds that keep us forever linked to our family.
For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her
characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have
explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and
personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career,
All That is Given illuminates one of the driving themes behind
Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's
self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick
explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy,
Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the
cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the
characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown
bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print
her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice,
championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the
1970s. Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight,
the essays in All That Is Given demonstrate one of America's most
beloved critics at her best.
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian
Gornick's celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and
again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her
life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and
biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the
importance of reading - and re-reading - as life progresses.
Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H.
Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette's The
Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in
Marguerite Duras's The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J.
L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of
Elizabeth Bowen's prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, "a writer
whose work has often made me love life more." After adopting two
cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris
Lessing's Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick's trademark verve
and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of
literature's power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer
and thinker who "still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a
capital L."
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Oasis: A Novel (Paperback)
Mary McCarthy, Vivian Gornick
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R351
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Save R21 (6%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Mary McCarthy's long-out-of-print second book satirises the
everyday struggles of a utopian commune seeking refuge after the
destruction of the Second World War. She hardly troubles to
disguise her characters - causing an outrage among the literary
elite of the day, who did not fail to recognise themselves among
her uncharitably, but all-too-accurately drawn portraits.
A vibrant, deeply human portrait of a woman dedicated to fierce
protest against the tyranny of institutions over individuals, by
the celebrated author Emma Goldman is the story of a modern radical
who took seriously the idea that inner liberation is the first
business of social revolution. Her politics, from beginning to end,
was based on resistance to that which thwarted the free development
of the inner self. The right to stay alive in one's senses, to
enjoy freedom of thought and speech, to reject the arbitrary use of
power-these were key demands in the many public protest movements
she helped mount. Anarchist par excellence, Goldman is one of the
memorable political figures of our time, not because of her gift
for theory or analysis or even strategy, but because some
extraordinary force of life in her burned, without rest or respite,
on behalf of human integrity-and she was able to make the thousands
of people who, for decades on end, flocked to her lectures, feel
intimately connected to the pain inherent in the abuse of that
integrity. To hear Emma describe, in language as magnetic as it was
illuminating, what the boot felt like on the neck, was to
experience the mythic quality of organized oppression. As the women
and men in her audience listened to her, the homeliness of their
own small lives became invested with a sense of drama that acted as
a catalyst for the wild, vagrant hope that things need not always
be as they were. All you had to do, she promised, was resist. In
time, she herself would become a world-famous symbol for the spirit
of resistance to the power of institutional authority over the lone
individual. In Emma Goldman, Vivian Gornick draws a surpassingly
intimate and insightful portrait of a woman of heroic proportions
whose performance on the stage of history did what Tolstoy said a
work of art should do: it made people love life more.
In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the
story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence.
There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none
has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as
ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna
O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the
unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond.
Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants,"
Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but
uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her
husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose
calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with
their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood,
to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work.
As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New
York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's
admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her
courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most
basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and
intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her
daughter's mother.
Unsparing, deeply courageous, "Fierce Attachments "is one of the
most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written,
a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the
most moving examples of the genre.
Offers powerful insight into the portrayal of romantic love by Jean
Rhys, Clover Adams, Christina Stead, Willa Cather, Grace Paley,
Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and others.
"Gornick makes forceful and dramatic judgments. . . . She is
fearless."
-Elizabeth Frank, The New York Times Book Review
"Writing is a second chance at life," writes Jane McDonnell. "I think all writing constitutes an effort to establish our own meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment." In Living to Tell the Tale, McDonnell draws on this impulse, as well as her own experiences as a writer and teacher of memoir, to give us what should become the definitive book on writing "crisis memoirs" and other kinds of personal narrative. She provides specific techniques and advice to help the writer discover his or her inner voice, recognize and then silence the inner censor, begin a narrative, and develop it with such aids as photographs and documents. Citing many landmark works such as Maxine Hong Kingston?s The Woman Warrior and Frank McCourt's Angela?s Ashes, as well as unpublished writings, McDonnell shows how writers can recreate past experiences through memories, and imaginatively reshape material into the story that needs to be told. Each chapter concludes with exercises to help the writer grapple with particular problems, such as trying to write about experiences that are only partly recalled. McDonnell also offers a list of recommended reading. • Memoirs such as Mary Karr's The Liars Club (Penguin)?have hit bestseller lists nationwide during the past year, and are of great interest to aspiring writers.
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How I Found America (Hardcover)
Anzia Yezierska; Introduction by Vivian Gornick
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R920
R803
Discovery Miles 8 030
Save R117 (13%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience,
Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories and novels, written from
the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the Jews of New York's Lower
East Side and their struggle to escape poverty and to partake of
America's promise. How I Found America gathers together all of
Yezierska's short fiction: the two collections published during her
lifetime--Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness--and seven
additional tales. Each story is authentic and immediate, as
memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next.
taken together, they constitute an enduring portrait of a time and
a people.
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Wasteland (Paperback)
Jo Sinclair; Introduction by Vivian Gornick
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R513
R436
Discovery Miles 4 360
Save R77 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Wasteland is the story of Jacob Braunowitz, a young Jewish man who,
tortured by self-doubts and nightmare fears, turns his back on his
heritage, his home, and even his name. Guided by a radical sister
who is "half like a man and half like a woman" and a wise and
compassionate psychiatrist, Jacob makes the arduous journey back to
his authentic identity, his family, and his people.
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