Siri Hustvedt Books

This is the story of two men who first become friends in 1970s New York, of the women in their lives, and of their sons, born the same year. Both Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, and Bill Weschler, a painter, are cultured, decent men, but neither is equipped to deal with what happens to their children - Leo's son drowns when he's 12, while Bill's son Mark grows up to be a delinquent, and the acolyte of a sinister, guru-like artist who spawns murder in his wake. Spanning the hedonism of the eighties and the chill-out nineties, this multi-layered novel combines a plot of mounting menace with a deeply moving account of familial relationships and a superbly observed portrait of an artist, set against the backdrop of a society reaching new depths of depravity in its frenetic quest for the next fashion, drug and thrill.

Internationally acclaimed as a novelist, Siri Hustvedt is also highly regarded as a writer of non-fiction whose insights are drawn from her broad knowledge in the arts, humanities and sciences. In this trilogy of works collected in a single volume, Hustvedt brings a feminist, interdisciplinary perspective to a range of subjects. Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Susan Sontag and Knut Ove Knausgaard are among those who come under her scrutiny. In the book's central essay, she explores the intractable mind-body problem and in the third section, reflects on the mysteries of hysteria, synesthesia, memory, perception and the philosophy of Kierkegaard. With clarity, wit, and passion, she exposes gender bias, upends received ideas and challenges her reader to think again.

Essays that explore what it means to be a human being draw upon the author's personal experiences; thoughts on memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the visual arts.

Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in a fresh essay collection by the award-winning essayist and novelist Siri Hustvedt, author of the bestselling What I Loved and Booker Prize-longlisted The Blazing World.

"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?"--Back cover

"The Blindfold" is a riveting account of one woman's search for identity within a maze of images imposed on her by others. Iris Vegan, an impoverished graduate student in New York City, is hired by an urban recluse to provide insanely precise verbal descriptions of the possessions of a murdered woman, a photographer's portrait of her takes on an eerie life of its own; Iris, hospitalized for migraine, shares a room with a neurologically devastated woman and finds in her uncanny echoes of her own shattered existence; finally, a novel she is helping to translate invades her life and sends her into the city's nighttime demimonde to act out its brutal themes. Hustvedt brings a fierce intelligence and stunning artistic originality to the darkest conundrums of sexuality and identity.

The intricate, devilishly playful, intellectually inspiring, emotionally involving new novel by the author of What I Loved.

A provocative, wildly funny and engrossing novel by the internationally acclaimed author of WHAT I LOVED, illustrated with her own drawings.

While speaking at a memorial event for her father, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. She managed to finish her talk and the paroxysms stopped, but not for good. Again and again she found herself a victim of the shudders. What had happened? Chronicling her search for the shaking woman, Hustvedt takes the reader on a journey into contemporary psychiatry, neurology and psychoanalysis. She unearths stories and theories from the annals of medical history, literature and philosophy, and delves into her own past. In the process, she raises fundamental questions: what is the relationship between mind and body? How do we remember? What is the self? In a seamless synthesis of personal experience and extensive research, Hustvedt conveys the often frightening mysteries of illness and the complexities of diagnosis. As engaging as it is thought-provoking, The Shaking Woman brilliantly illuminates the age-old dilemma of the mental and the physical, and what it means to be human.

"The Sorrows of an American" is a soaring feat of storytelling about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another.