Abominations
Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“A rare voice, someone who challenges orthodoxies in the way that many journalists and public intellectuals claim to do but don’t. It is bracing to spend time in the company of such a smart, plain-spoken and unpredictable person.”—Wall Street Journal
A striking collection of essays from the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Should We Stay or Should We Go, So Much for That, and The Post-Birthday World.
Novelist, cultural observer, and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces “under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous” points of view, she filets cherished shibboleths and the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken us.
Bringing together thirty-five works curated from her many columns, features, essays, and op-eds for the likes of the Spectator, the Guardian, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, speeches and reviews, and some unpublished pieces, Abominations reveals Shriver at her most iconoclastic and personal. Relentlessly skeptical, cutting, and contrarian, this collection showcases Shriver’s piquant opinions on a wide range of topics, including religion, politics, illness, mortality, family and friends, tennis, gender, immigration, consumerism, health care, and taxes.
In her characteristically frank manner, Shriver shrewdly skewers the concept of language “crimes,” while chafing at arbitrary limitations on speech and literature that crimp artistic expression and threaten intellectual freedom. Many an essay in Abominations reflects sentiments that have “brought hell and damnation down on my head,” as she cheerfully explains, and have threatened her with “cancellation” more than once.
Throughout, Shriver offers insights on her novels and explores the perks and pitfalls of becoming a successful artist. In revisiting old pieces and rejected essays, Shriver updates and expands her thinking. “Enlightened” progressive readers will find plenty to challenge here. But they may find, to their surprise, insights with which they agree.
A timely synthesis of Shriver's expansive work, Abominations reveals this provocative, talented writer at her most assured.
What happens when one of our most fearless writers challenges the orthodoxies of modern thought?
Cultural Criticism: With scalpel-like precision, Shriver filets cherished shibboleths on everything from the nanny state to “woke” culture.Intellectual Freedom: Unpack the arguments against language “crimes” and the arbitrary limitations on speech that threaten artistic expression.Unpopular Opinions: Discover the thinking that has threatened Shriver with “cancellation” more than once, with incisive takes on immigration, #MeToo, and Brexit.The Writer’s Life: Go behind the curtain with deeply personal essays on the perks and pitfalls of becoming a successful artist and the hard-won lessons of a life in letters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Shriver (Should We Stay or Should We Go) collects more than two decades' worth of her nonfiction writing in this hit-or-miss compendium. Topics range from the personal, such as the death of the author's brother, to the pedantic—as with a look at Shriver's "battle" against comma splices. Shriver also navigates a slew of professional controversies: in her opening address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, she said she hoped "the concept of ‘cultural appropriation' is a passing fad (albeit one not passing fast enough)," and goes on, in "a slight expansion" of a New York Times op-ed (rather than the "the crimped, eviscerated" version that the paper published), to respond to a writer who was upset by the address: "This is a performance of injury, an opportunistic and even triumphant display of injury." While her prose is reliably strong, some of the stances she takes in service of being a self-proclaimed iconoclast can be a slog to get through, especially when they near condescension. (Of a diversity questionnaire sent to Penguin Random House authors, she writes "You can self-classify as disabled, and three sequential questions obviously hope to elicit that you've been as badly educated as humanly possible.") Shriver's fans, though, will make room on their shelves for it.
