Home › Books › Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature…
Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time
by
23/99
Critics' Rating Index
32/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
34/99
Volume of Reviews
20/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
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
"While most essays on literature and culture focus on canonical figures (Melville, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Edna St."
"To read Gornick is to firstly fall in love with the act of reading ..."
"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."
"These previously published writings, collected in reverse chronological order (from the late 2010s to early 1970s), offer a fascinating insight into what has been achieved and what has been lost during those five decades ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!