"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master "whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness" and "thin, plain, tense, sour" Alice B. Toklas, the "worker bee" who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate "marriage." As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. "The...
"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography...
"Astringent and absorbing. . . . Iphigenia in Forest Hills casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell -- the kind of spell to which Ms. Malcolm's admirers (and I am one) have become addicted."--Dwight Garner, New York Times
"She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting new book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The defendant, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a beautiful young physician, is accused of hiring an assassin...
"Astringent and absorbing. . . . Iphigenia in Forest Hills casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell -- the kind of spell to which Ms....
'Reading Chekhov is a literary pilgrimage, homage, travelogue, biography, literary criticism and a restrained love letter all rolled into one ... It is the work of an iridescent and sympathetic imagination' The Times
'Reading Chekhov is a literary pilgrimage, homage, travelogue, biography, literary criticism and a restrained love letter all rolled into one ... It i...
A collection of essays on art, artists and the troubled nature of biography. It features ruminations on writers and artists as diverse as Edith Wharton, Diane Arbus and the Bloomsbury Group, and includes Janet Malcolm's now iconic essay about the painter David Salle.
A collection of essays on art, artists and the troubled nature of biography. It features ruminations on writers and artists as diverse as Edith Wharto...
Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In The Silent Woman, renowned writer Janet Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, to discover how Plath became an enigma in literary history. The Silent Woman is a brilliant, elegantly reasoned inquiry into the nature of biography, dispelling our innocence as readers, as well as shedding a light onto why Plath's legend continues to exert such a hold on our imaginations.
Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In The Silent Woman, renow...
