The Position of Spoons
and other intimacies, a collection of essays from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Publisher Description
From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer
In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her – including a letter to her dying mother and to an absent friend. This volume illuminates and celebrates a rich and varied intellectual inheritance – and reflects on how it has enriched the author’s own work. Taking in questions of mortality, language, gender, place, consumerism and everyday living, the acclaimed novelist invites her reader behind the curtain of a creative life, ‘in which the position of the spoon is always changing’.
‘Levy’s writing is dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll, [and] devastating . . . Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling’ Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Writing is self-excavation, a painful digging into the archaeology of our own experience. Levy is good on the prices we find ourselves paying: for art, for love, for fitting in . . . [She] plunges into the depths, taking us with her’ Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and playwright Levy (August Blue) delivers a dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more. The stylish essays—some as brief as one page—run the gamut from funny reflections on the Mona Lisa ("Her hair looks uncared for under her hood. She probably has lice") and oral sex ("a super sport that should be included in the Olympic games") to weightier considerations of the human tendency to look away from discomfort. Of model and photographer Lee Miller, whose career took her from fashion runways to documenting the liberation of Buchenwald, Levy writes, "she both hides from and gives herself to the camera." Taken together, Levy's extraordinary observations (eggs are "sculptures" that "have the added uncanny allure of being an artwork that is made inside the body of a hen") amount to a trip through a consciousness trained to deeply consider everything it encounters—be it a pair of shoes, a bowl of lemons, or the work of Simone de Beauvoir. "There is the story and then there is everything else," Levy posits. Here, she gives space to everything else, with sublime results. Readers will be grateful for this generous peek inside a singular mind.
