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Essays
by Janet Malcolm
Like Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm's previous collection, Nobody's Looking at You brings together previously uncompiled pieces, mainly from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
The title piece of this wonderfully eclectic collection is a profile of the fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose mother often said to her, "Nobody's looking at you." But in every piece in this volume, Malcolm looks closely and with impunity at a broad range of subjects, from Donald Trump's TV nemesis Rachel Maddow, to the stiletto-heel-wearing pianist Yuju Wang, to "the big-league game" of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In an essay called "Socks," the Pevears are seen as the "sort of asteroid [that] has hit the safe world of Russian Literature in English translation," and in "Dreams and Anna Karenina," the focus is Tolstoy, "one of literature's greatest masters of manipulative techniques." Nobody's Looking at You concludes with "Pandora's Click," a brief, cautionary piece about e-mail etiquette that was written in the early two thousands, and that reverberates―albeit painfully―to this day.
"Starred Review. Outstanding ... varied and witty ... With no weak selections and several strikingly prescient ones, this collection shows its author as a master of narrative nonfiction." - Publishers Weekly
"Highly recommended for a range of readers, especially those interested in the various topics discussed." - Library Journal
"A master of the craft offers up sprightly and fervent essays ... Intelligent, savvy, and stylish literary journalism." - Kirkus
"One of the premier narrative non-fiction writers of her time." - The New Republic
This information about Nobody's Looking at You was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Janet Malcolm is 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 is 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.
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