Yonder: Essays

Siri Hustvedt

yul 2013 · Vendu par Henry Holt and Company

À propos de cet e-book

Sparkling essays on a variety of subjects--literature, art, popular culture, autobiography--by a renowned young American novelist.

In her brilliant and daring novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, Siri Hustvedt has won critical acclaim and a rapidly expanding international audience. But she is also a wide-ranging essayist and critic, frequently reexamining in her fascinating nonfiction many of the central leitmotifs of her fiction.

The six pieces in Yonder, Hustvedt's first book of essays, are all meditations on the complex relationship between art and the world. They include a personal essay on memory and place, which investigates the images we retain from our lives, the lives of others in the world, and the lives of characters in books. In "Vermeer's Annunciation," Hustvedt gives an entirely original interpretation of the Vermeer painting Woman with a Pearl Necklace. In "Ghosts at the Table," she examines the essence of still life as a genre in painting from Cotan and Chardin to Philip Guston. Other essays include a profound piece about Dickens, a reassessment of The Great Gatsby, and a witty and provocative assault on contemporary pieties entitled "A Plea for Eros."

À propos de l'auteur

Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English literature and is the internationally acclaimed author of five novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, The Blindfold, and The Summer Without Men, as well as a growing body of nonfiction, including Living, Thinking, Looking, A Plea for Eros, and Mysteries of the Rectangle, and an interdisciplinary investigation of the body and mind in The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. She lives in Brooklyn.