Vivian Gornick
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English
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Seminal essays on loneliness, living in New York, friendship, feminism, and writing from nonfiction master Vivian Gornick.
Vivian Gornick's Approaching Eye Level is a brave collection of personal essays that finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, and feminist) trying to observe herself and the world without sentiment, cynicism, or nostalgia. Whether walking along the streets of New York or teaching writing at a university, Gornick...
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English
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A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Vivian Gornick's The End of the Novel of Love explores the meaning of love and marriage as literary themes in the twentieth century.
In The End of the Novel of Love, an acclaimed and provocative collection of criticism, Gornick applies the same intelligence, honesty, and insight that define her memoirs to an analysis of love and marriage as literary themes in the twentieth century....
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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2020.
One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life
I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can't remember the time when I didn't have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me.
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick's celebration of passionate reading,...
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English
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A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments
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...
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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...
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English
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In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the principal 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...
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to equality uniquely American in character. Her writing...
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In this 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...
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Writer and critic Vivian Gornick's long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life.
"Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project.
Now...
Author
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English
Description
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...