Taking A Long Look
Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
One of our most vital and incisive writers on literature, feminism, and knowing one's self
For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world.
In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, Taking a Long Look brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s.
Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This parade of greatest hits from Gornick (Unfinished Business) spans the essayist's career as a literary and cultural critic. The pieces, organized from newest to oldest, cover 40 years and are organized into four sections: literature, culture, "Two New York Stories," and "Essays in Feminism." Gornick's writing on literature covers such figures as "iconized" Herman Melville, "frighteningly clever" Mary McCarthy, and Kathleen Collins, whose voice in her posthumous Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? "explore the astonishment of human existence." The essays on culture unite around themes of justice, including Hannah Arendt's writing on Jewish persecution, the environmentalist awakening led by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and how Uncle Tom's Cabin proves "that politics and literature are inextricably bound." The concluding section revisits Gornick's work from the 1970s on "the earliest stages of feminist formulation," such as an essay on early consciousness raising groups. Gornick skillfully reads authors' lives and work, observing "how good writing struggles to emerge from the inner chaos with which we all live," and she writes with precision and a voice that is dry yet deeply humane. Gornick's collection is illuminating and a welcome addition to the astute critic's oeuvre.
