Human Relations and Other Difficulties
Pieces from the LRB and Elsewhere
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
Mary-Kay Wilmers has been a giant of the English literary world for decades. She was integral in the founding of LRB in 1979 during the year-long lock-out at The Times and has served as its editor in chief since 1992. Under her leadership, the magazine has pulled no punches and faced the inevitable controversies head on, leading the Observer to wonder whether LRB is 'the best magazine in the world'. Which may explain why, while most print media has been struggling, LRB has grown to become the most circulated magazine of its kind in Europe.
This collection of Mary-Kay Wilmers' essays, book reviews, short articles and obituaries handles subjects from mistresses to marketing, and seduction to psychoanalysts, all with Wilmers' trademark insightful wit. Throughout she uses her deep and varied knowledge to provide both context and cutting criticism. This creates a portrait of a particular slice of English culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanning four decades spent as London Review of Books editor, this eclectic and acidic selection of pieces by Wilmers (The Eitingtons), mostly published in the LRB, captures the evolution of a sharp-eyed literary critic. The book under review is often incidental; instead, Wilmers offers fascinating character studies of the authors and their subjects, both of whom tend to be "difficult" women, including Germaine Greer, Patty Hearst, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys. Wilmers has a voice as crisp, clear, and dry as gin, simultaneously amused and wise, as when she notes that "what we see when we look into is that it was never all that stable or all that virtuous." She delights in the absurd for instance, during a rambling through the late Victorian bestseller Pears' Shilling Cyclopaedia, she came across entries under "T" that included "Tea Drinkers, the Greatest," "Tourists Killed in the Alps," and "Trades Injurious to the Teeth." Avowedly not a feminist, Wilmers nonetheless conveys a sharp sense that "it is a man's world that we live in." Given her ear for the perfect quote, irony, and glancing judgment on human foibles none of which "exceed the proper bounds of malice," as she observes of well-written Times of London obituaries fellow critics will appreciate this distillation of Wilmers's legacy and the record of a distinct sensibility that feels bitterly astute, inimitably of its time, and enduringly relevant.
