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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
‘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
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Reviews
Her erudition, the sharp clarity of her thinking, the variety of her sources and the supple ways in which she weaves them into personal narrative, coupled with her fearlessness in the face of those aspects of the human condition which are of necessity ambiguous, infuse her work with a rare kind of quiet intellectual confidence...I'll be returning to these essays.
richly intelligent insights on every page
Siri Hustvedt is best known as a novelist and her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist...there is something refreshingly straightforward about her style. It has the confidence born of complex but well digested thoughts and thus lacks the tendency to obfuscate that is the hallmark of the inferior thinker's style.
...she is an inspiring guide to territory where both the humanities and the sciences can throw light on the ways in which we construct meaning in our lives.
Hustvedt addresses a broad public without dumbing down her material... At once stimulating and warm-hearted, with sentences of drop-dead beauty and acuity on nearly every page.
Hustvedt's deep interest in art, psychology, and neuroscience shape her brilliantly insightful novels as well as her virtuoso essays...Mystery, fact, intelligence, and enchantment flourish here.
exquisitely eloquent...You'll be by turns inspired, provoked, educated and enchanted. Her writing is scientifically precise and poetically elegant, and this intense compilation merits careful attention. It's a book you can return to time and time again.
These essays offer thoughts on locating morality in the brain, the origins of desire and who we are when we sleep...I suggest you take this book to your favourite corner, turn off the phone and allow yourself to be reminded of the pure pleasure of using your mind.