Новинки Вивиан Грник

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

Icône du journalisme en Amérique, Vivian Gornick a surtout connu le succès avec ses textes autobiographiques. Le plus « culte » , «Attachement féroce», publié en 1987, a connu un triomphe critique lors de sa parution en grand format en 2017 chez Rivages. Plus de 8 000 lecteurs sont tombés sous le charme de ce livre. Dans la lignée de «L'Année de la pensée magique» de Didion ou de «Pourquoi être heureux quand on peut être normal ?» de Jeanette Winterson, Gornick s'empare d'un sujet universel : les relations mère-fille. Dès les premières pages, on tombe sous le charme de cette mère puissante et terrible. Vivian raconte l'amour fou qui les lie et leurs marches dans la ville.

Vivian Gornick marche dans les rues de New York. La ville lui sert de confidente, de point d'ancrage et d'inspiration. A ses côtés, on monte dans les bus de Manhattan, on arpente les rues bouillonnantes du West Side ou du Bronx. Saisissant parmi la faune urbaine des instants de vérité, elle s'interroge sur tout ce qui a fait d'elle une femme à part, soucieuse de refuser les figures imposées de la société et de défendre sa liberté.
Mais ce voyage intime touche à l'universel car, en chemin, Gornick explore l'amitié, la solitude, le sexe, la vieillesse, la littérature, le couple… Drôle et lucide, elle capture l'essence de nos vies avec une justesse impressionnante.

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees.

Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis

In this newly revised twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed writer and journalist Vivian Gornick interviews famous and lesser-known scientists, compares their experiences then and now, and shows that, although not much has changed in the world of science, what is different is women’s expectations that they can and will succeed.

Everything from the disparaging comments by Harvard’s then-president to government reports and media coverage has focused on the ways in which women supposedly can’t do science. Gornick’s original interviews show how deep and severe discrimination against women was back then in all scientific fields. Her new interviews, with some of the same women she spoke to twenty-five years ago, provide a fresh description of the hard times and great successes these women have experienced.

Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort.

Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that "ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman's bitter birthright." Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: "Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop." Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers -- talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men -- who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known -- she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond.

Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work.

As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother.

Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

Offers powerful insight into the portrayal of romantic love by Jean Rhys, Clover Adams, Christina Stead, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and others.

Comptes pendents: apunts d'una relectora empedre?da ?s la celebraci? per part de Vivian Gornick, una de les pensadores, cr?tiques i escriptores m?s importants del panorama nordameric? contemporani, de la passi? que ha dominat la seva vida des de petita: la passi? lectora.L'escriptora i cr?tica liter?ria, encara una lectora vigorosa, intel·ligent i vital, parla del retorn una i altra vegada als llibres que la van forjar, que la van fer qui ?s ara, i reflexiona sobre l'impacte de les lectures en diferents moments crucials de la seva vida. Els nou assajos que componen el llibre barregen cr?tica liter?ria, mem?ria i biografia, i giren al voltant de la import?ncia de llegir —i rellegir— conforme anem envellint i la vida va avan?ant. Escrita amb el nervi i la profunditat d'?nima marca de la casa, Comptes pendents ?s un reconeixement magistral del poder que t? la literatura d'il·luminar les nostres vides.

Vivian Gornick ?s una de les veus m?s l?cides de la cr?tica i l'assaig contemporani i una de les memorialistes m?s commovedores dels nostres temps. En aquest volum apleguem els seus dos espl?ndids llibres de mem?ries.  Vincles ferotges, publicat l'any 1987, ?s un dels testimonis m?s coratjosos i inspiradors sobre els lligams familiars que s'hagin escrit mai, constru?t a partir de converses, records i discussions entre Gornick i la seva mare mentre passegen per Nova York, que tamb? t? un paper important?ssim en tot el llibre. Gaireb? trenta anys m?s tard, l'any 2015, retrobem Gornick a  La dona singular i la ciutat, una oda a l'amistat, a l'amor i a la vida urbana teixida a la manera d'un collage narratiu que inclou converses sobre les relacions humanes, reflexions sobre feminisme i el fet de ser dona, soltera i sense fills, i sobre l'evoluci? de l'amistat al llarg dels segles.Aquests dos llibres ens descobreixen la veu implacable, sensible, cr?tica, vulnerable, tena?, desacomplexada i ferotgement independent d'una dona, Vivian Gornick, que al llarg de la vida ha viscut i ha confrontat els seus conflictes en una recerca ?nica i innegociable: el descobriment i la consci?ncia d'ella mateixa.