Search results for ""author janet malcolm""

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 château 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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Prizewinning journalist Janet Malcolm discovers the elements of Greek tragedy in a sensational New York City murder trial"Astringent and absorbing. . . . Iphigenia in Forest Hills casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell — the kind of spell to which Ms. Malcolm’s admirers (and I am one) have become addicted."—Dwight Garner, New York Times"This is shrewd and quirky crime reporting at its irresistible and disabused best."—Louis Begley, Wall Street Journal "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The defendant, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a beautiful young physician, is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, Daniel Malakov, a respected orthodontist, in the presence of their four-year old child. The prosecutor calls it an act of vengeance: just weeks before Malakov was killed in cold blood, he was given custody of Michelle for inexplicable reasons. It is the "Dickensian ordeal" of Borukhova's innocent child that drives Malcolm's inquiry.With the intellectual and emotional precision for which she is known, Malcolm looks at the trial—"a contest between competing narratives"—from every conceivable angle. It is the chasm between our ideals of justice and the human factors that influence every trial—from divergent lawyering abilities to the nature of jury selection, the malleability of evidence, and the disposition of the judge—that is perhaps most striking.Surely one of the most keenly observed trial books ever written, Iphigenia in Forest Hills is ultimately about character and "reasonable doubt." As Jeffrey Rosen writes, it is "as suspenseful and exciting as a detective story, with all the moral and intellectual interest of a great novel.""Iphigenia in Forest Hills is another dazzling triumph from Janet Malcolm. Here, as always, Malcolm’s work inspires the best kind of disquiet in a reader—the obligation to think." —Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court"A remarkable achievement that ranks with Malcolm's greatest books. Her scrupulous reporting and interviews with protagonists on both sides of the trial make her own narrative as suspenseful and exciting as a detective story, with all the moral and intellectual interest of a great novel." —Jeffrey Rosen, author of The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Los mejores ensayos sobre arte y literatura de una maestra del periodismoUno de los libros del 2013 para el Publisher Weekly y finalista del premio de la crítica de EEUULa obra de Janet Malcolm figura destacada en cualquier canon de la no ficción contemporánea, con piezas tan brillantes como la que da título a esta antología, con sus cuarenta y un intentos fallidos de comenzar un perfil del pintor David Salle, que acaban componiendo un retrato excepcional del artista. Malcolm está entre los autores más estimulantes intelectualmente, capaz de convertir epifanías de la percepción en estallidos de conocimiento como escribió David Lehman en The Boston Globe.Esta antología reúne piezas publicadas a lo largo de varias décadas, sobre todo en The New Yorker y The New York Review of Books, que recogen su interés por los artistas y su trabajo, pintores, fotógrafos, escritores y críticos. Explora la obsesión del grupo de Bloomsbury por la creación tanto plástica como literaria; las apas

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less