Home › Books › Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays
Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays
by
58/99
Critics' Rating Index
21/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
89/99
Volume of Reviews
37/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in this new essay collection from Siri Hustvedt, an exploration of the shifting borders that define human experience, including boundaries we usually take for granted—between ourselves and others, nature and nurture, viewer and artwork—which turn out to be far less stable than we imagine.Described as "a 21st-century Virginia Woolf" in the Literary Review (UK), Man Booker longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath's journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art. This moving, fierce, and often funny book is finally about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.
Reviews
"Hustvedt is a transporting storyteller ..."
"Mothers, Fathers, and Others makes a fascinating companion to Motherhood: A Manifesto ..."
"Another outstanding compilation of essays from Hustvedt ..."
"The essays about her family are particularly engrossing, as is the one called 'Mentor Ghosts,' a sort of Hustvedtian take on Rebecca Solnit's 'Men Explain Things to Me,' where Hustvedt describes the repeated attempts of men to credit her husband (the novelist Paul Auster) for writing her novels."
"In her typical fashion, Hustvedt pulls from psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and art criticism to make brilliant connections among her takes on the world."
"Hustvedt's enthusiasm for her subjects and the ease with which she discusses them make it a delight to plunge into the deep end of a subject previously unknown to the reader ..."
"'A Walk With My Mother' could easily be an entire book, one I would eagerly devour."
"Even within individual essays in Mothers, Fathers, and Others she jumps from topic to topic, and this diversity presents a dichotomy of sorts."
"But readers who come to Hustvedt's writing for her more academic considerations of neuroscience, philosophy, visual art and literary theory will also find much to appreciate here ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!