remembered rapture
the writer at work
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
“For anyone who writes, or seeks to understand the writing process, or wants to know more about the erudite and passionate mind of bell hooks, this is the book to read.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
In this timeless essay collection on the writing life, award-winning author and renowned thinker bell hooks shares the secrets gleaned from years of facing the blank page, pen in hand.
At a time when the death of the book has been proclaimed, hooks’s Remembered Rapture beats with a pulsing passion for words, reminding us of literacy’s potency and the vital joys of reading and writing. In contemplative essays infused with her personal experience, hooks reveals her wide-ranging intellectual scope. With insight and vision, hooks untangles the complex personae of women writers, especially those whose work goes against the grain.
This inspiring collection from a treasured American author is for everyone who believes in the power of the written word.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 22 essays in cultural and literary critic hooks's 17th book were written over a period of 20 years and loosely trace her decision to become a writer and her metamorphosis into an academic. Together, they constitute a mixture of intellectual autobiography and manifesto on the proper living of a writer's life. Although in some essays hooks ruminates on her childhood in a working-class Southern black family, many others read like transcripts of lectures for college courses in American literature (hooks has taught at Yale, Oberlin, and the City College of New York), complete with suggested readings. She frequently analyzes her own work alongside the writing of Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Lorraine Hansberry and Jamaica Kincaid. (According to hooks, Kincaid is taken more seriously by "mainstream" critics because she is not African American and because "writing by black writers who are not African-Americans tends to be seen as always more literary and therefore more valuable.") Some of the essays deal with the "politics" of publishing, the duplicity and rancorousness of academe and envy within the ranks of black writers. As always, hooks emphasizes the importance of personal and political identity to writing. Her prose is clear and she presents her arguments with a confident passion. If her politics are predictable, hooks infuses the best of these essays with a personal tone that sheds warm light on this one particular writer's writing life.
