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To be published simultaneously with Black Vodka, the Man Booker Prize–shortlisted writer's new collection of short stories, a shimmering jewel of a book about writing.
Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay “Why I Write.” Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter-political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm-and Levy's newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.
As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK where she played at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye.
Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the author at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the reader into a writer's heart.
| Published | Jun 10 2014 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 128 |
| ISBN | 9781620405659 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Dimensions | 8 x 5 inches |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
