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Description
A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, to publish alongside her new work of nonfiction, The Cost of Living.
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 writer at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the reader into a writer's heart.
Product details
Published | Jul 10 2018 |
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Format | Paperback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 128 |
ISBN | 9781635572247 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Dimensions | 8 x 6 inches |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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A lively, vivid account of how the most innocent details of a writer's personal story can gain power in fiction.
New York Times Book Review
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Profound.
Los Angeles Times
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[Levy] is a skilled wordsmith and creates an array of intense emotions and moods in precise, controlled prose.
The Independent (UK)
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A vivid, striking account of a writer's life.
The Spectator (UK)
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Powerful.
New Statesman (UK)
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An up-to-date version of 'A Room of One's Own', and, like the Virginia Woolf essay, I suspect it will be quoted for many years to come.
Irish Examiner