Vivian Gornick is an author whose works offer piercing insights into the human psyche and social dynamics. Her writing often delves into themes of identity, love, and the search for meaning in the modern world. With a singular ability to capture the complexities of human emotion and experience, Gornick engages readers through her candid and reflective style. Her essays and memoirs provide profound meditations on life that resonate with universal human desires and dilemmas.
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.
One of our most vital and incisive writers on literature, feminism, and knowing one's self 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, Taking a Long Look 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.
One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her lifeI sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me.
The book has garnered significant acclaim, being highlighted as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and recognized as one of Library Journal's Best Books of 2020. It promises a compelling narrative that resonates with readers, showcasing themes or elements that have captured critical attention and praise within the literary community. This recognition suggests a depth of storytelling and quality that appeals to a wide audience.
Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, [this book] is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin's crimes became public--Bac
Seven seminal essays addressing loneliness, friendship and feminism, written in Gornick's inimitable voice, this collection has never been published in Australia.
"A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same." --
Tells the story of a modern radical who took seriously the idea that inner liberation is the first business of social revolution. This title draws an 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.
Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature.
Focusing on Elizabeth Cady Stanton's profound impact on the women's suffrage movement, this biographical essay by Vivian Gornick highlights her role as a leading feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Stanton's philosophical insights and commitment to equality reflect a distinctly American approach to women's rights. Through her writings and activism, she embodies the essence of feminism as a liberation movement, illustrating why it has thrived in the United States more than anywhere else globally.