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'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.' Hilary Mantel, Guardian
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.
Siri Hustvedt's relentlessly curious mind and expansive intellect are on full display in this stunning new collection of essays, whose subjects range from the nature of memory and time to what we inherit from our parents, the power of art during tragedy, misogyny, motherhood, neuroscience, and the books we turn to during a pandemic. Drawing on family history as well as her own life and experiences, she examines the porousness of borders of all kinds in a masterful intellectual journey that is at once personal and universal. Ultimately, Mothers, Fathers, and Others reminds us that the boundaries we take for granted-between ourselves and others, between art and viewer-are far less stable than we imagine.
About the author
Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels including the international bestseller
What I Loved,
The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and
Memories of the Future, as well as five collections of essays:
Yonder,
Mysteries of the Rectangle:
Essays on Painting,
A Plea for Eros,
Living,
Thinking,
Looking and
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. She has also published a poetry collection,
Reading To You, and the memoir
The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.
Hustvedt has won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the European Essay Prize for her essay
The Delusions of Certainty. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the
New York Times and the
Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Summary
'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.' Hilary Mantel, Guardian
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.
Siri Hustvedt's relentlessly curious mind and expansive intellect are on full display in this stunning new collection of essays, whose subjects range from the nature of memory and time to what we inherit from our parents, the power of art during tragedy, misogyny, motherhood, neuroscience, and the books we turn to during a pandemic. Drawing on family history as well as her own life and experiences, she examines the porousness of borders of all kinds in a masterful intellectual journey that is at once personal and universal. Ultimately, Mothers, Fathers, and Others reminds us that the boundaries we take for granted-between ourselves and others, between art and viewer-are far less stable than we imagine.
Foreword
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.
Additional text
Siri Hustvedt takes feminist discourse to a new level . . . Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a powerful collection with an impressive variety of disciplines through whose prism the themes of art, motherhood, neuroscience, misogyny and sex are revealed. It is an engaging and educational read that makes a valuable contribution to contemporary feminist discourse.
Report
Memoir, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and literary criticism combine in a thoughtful essay collection . . . Now, as issues of surrogacy and trans motherhood pose fresh challenges, feminism's confrontation with the issue feels newly urgent. Siri Hustvedt joins the fray with a mixture of directness and obliqueness. She takes on motherhood from every direction, combining memoir with ethnography, the history of science and psychoanalysis, literary and art criticism. Lara Feigel Guardian
