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Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time
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About This Book
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, All That is Given 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, All That Is Given 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 All That Is Given demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.
Reviews
"Gornick skillfully reads authors' lives and work, observing 'how good writing struggles to emerge from the inner chaos with which we all live,' and she writes with precision and a voice that is dry yet deeply humane."
"Reading her crisp, incisive prose, there is no doubt about how she feels about the work of such canonical figures as Herman Melville, Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, but she becomes less incendiary over the years ..."
"It is incredible what she can read out of material."
"A feminist perspective on life and art ..."
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