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
"They aren't bad, or even particularly unsuccessful; they just stick out as being relics of another time, in contrast with Hustvedt's other, more enduringly relevant works."
"'A Walk With My Mother' could easily be an entire book, one I would eagerly devour."
"The collection would have been far stronger had Hustvedt left out the musings on too-familiar works—and to be honest, I probably didn't need to read that much about the lack of proper appreciation of the placenta."
"Hustvedt is a transporting storyteller ..."
"Many of the longer essays run into this issue, relying more on digression than thematic cohesion."
"Mothers, Fathers, and Others sifts a wide range of memory, experience and disciplinary perspectives into essays that bring into focus the profound contradictions of motherhood ..."
"Another outstanding compilation of essays from Hustvedt ..."
"Fans of Hustvedt's work will welcome this, and those less familiar will delight in discovering her witty, lavish style."
"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 ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!