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- Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?
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Description
Bloomsbury presents Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski, read by Charlotte Randle and Chloe Diski.
A tonic for the soul ... I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal' Emilia Clarke
'Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny' Sunday Times
'She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be' New Yorker
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books – selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude – have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'.
From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated – and mordantly funny.
Product details
| Published | Jul 22 2021 |
|---|---|
| Format | Audiobook |
| Duration | 13 hours and 32 minutes |
| ISBN | 9781526638809 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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[Diski's] reviews and essays admitted doubt. They were marvelously shrewd but approachable and witty. Diski's articles made the sound of someone chewing her fingernails very intelligently.
Dwight Garner, New York Times Editors' Choice
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Bask in the plenitude of Jenny Diski's mind with this posthumous collection of short essays on everything from Jeffrey Dahmer to SCRATCHY WOOLEN VESTS? An injection of grade-A intellectual adrenaline!
Molly Young, Vulture
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With the posthumous publication of Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? . . . . [Diski's] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia.
Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Review
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Everything in her delicious essays is filtered, unabashedly, through her particularly sharp, uncompromising consciousness.
Claire Messud, Harper's
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What a magnificent collection of writings Diski left . . . If you love a good essay, don't miss this one.
Alma
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Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise . . . A tonic for the soul.
Emilia Clarke





















