Still Pictures

For decades, Janet Malcolm’s books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life.

Beginning with the image of a morose young girl on her way from Prague to New York in 1939, to fitful early loves and her fascination with what it might mean to be a ‘bad girl’, Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, she delves into the world of William Shawn’s New Yorker and the infamous libel trial that saw her become a character in her own drama.

Written with Malcolm’s peerless skill and sharp wit, this memoir from a titan of American letters is unlike any other.

Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

‘What unites these pieces is a mood—heavy, autumnal, nostalgic…There is stirring, beautifully structured writing here, particularly in the title essay, a profile of Fisher, which combines many of the writer’s signal interests—our unconscious aggression and the way we methodically and unknowingly recreate the world of our childhood in our adult lives.’ New York Times on Nobody’s Looking at You

‘Janet Malcolm…remains a ruthless, dazzling journalist.’ Guardian on Nobody’s Looking at You