Product Description

One of the country's most elegant and controversial writers presents a collection of her essays, reviews, and profiles, showing the range and depth of her engagement with art, literature, and psychoanalysis and the brilliance of her epigrammatic style. A dazzling representative collection by the journalist whom critic Harold Bloom calls "a calmly rational Alice in Wonderland".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1137685 in Books
• Published on: 1993-11-02
• Released on: 1993-11-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Malcolm's ( In the Freud Archives ) fascination with psychoanalysis permeates the 16 erudite and assured essays, reviews and reports assembled here. Their range, however, is broad. Malcolm analyzes new interpretations of Freud's Dora case and wittily assesses a book on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, The Death of an Intellectual Hero by Stuart Schneiderman. She proposes that the autobiographies of the gay explorer Tobias Schneebaum "are like the three stages of an analysis," observes that Vaclav Havel's prison letters to his wife suggest "the behavior of the supine member of the psychoanalytic couple" and wonders about the tension in Ved Mehta's memoirs between the "narrating adult" and the "experiencing child." Her reports--on so-called structural family therapy, on one-time Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy and on a trip to Prague in April 1990--exhibit the same intellectual rigor but have a leavening of detail and dialogue that makes them more accessible. Most of these pieces first appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Why don't more people write like [Malcolm]?... She is cast from the mold of the Eastern European intellectual: beholden to modernism. as familiar with Kundera's exile as she is with Freud's Vienna. This sensibility must grant her the detachment she sometimes so mercilessly employs, but it also gives her an unassailable passion for getting to the center of things."

-- Boston Globe -- Review

Review
"Why don't more people write like [Malcolm]?... She is cast from the mold of the Eastern European intellectual: beholden to modernism. as familiar with Kundera's exile as she is with Freud's Vienna. This sensibility must grant her the detachment she sometimes so mercilessly employs, but it also gives her an unassailable passion for getting to the center of things."

-- Boston Globe