Fierce Attachments

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466819006
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fierce Attachments written by Vivian Gornick and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2005-09-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374154856
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fierce Attachments written by Vivian Gornick and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1987 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the author's lifelong battle with her mother for independence.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807071236
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fierce Attachments written by Vivian Gornick and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author recounts her childhood experiences living in a tenement, looks at her relationship with her mother, and describes the lives of women bound to husbands they do not love.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374711682
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Odd Woman and the City written by Vivian Gornick and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 0374719918
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Approaching Eye Level written by Vivian Gornick and published by Picador. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, 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 is a woman exploring her need for conversation and connection—with men and women, colleagues and strangers. She recalls her stint as a waitress in the Catskills and a failed friendship with an older woman and mentor, and reconsiders her experiences in the feminist movement, while living alone, and in marriage. Turning her trademark sharp eye on herself, Gornick works to see her part in things—how she has both welcomed and avoided contact, and how these attempts at connections have enlivened and, at times, defeated her. First published in 1996, Approaching Eye Level is an unrelentingly honest collection of essays that finds Gornick at her best, reminding us that we can come to know ourselves only by engaging fully with the world.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466819014
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Situation and the Story written by Vivian Gornick and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-10-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788739787
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Taking A Long Look written by Vivian Gornick and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374716609
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unfinished Business written by Vivian Gornick and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”

Author : Nikki Meredith
Publisher : Citadel Press
ISBN 13 : 0806538600
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Manson Women and Me written by Nikki Meredith and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of prison interviews, a journalist probes the minds of the women who killed for Charles Manson in this “fascinating study of human behavior” (Kirkus). In the summer of 1969, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel carried out horrific acts of butchery on the orders of the charismatic cult leader Charles Manson. But to anyone who knew them growing up, they were bright, promising girls, seemingly incapable of such an unfathomable crime. Award-winning journalist Nikki Meredith began visiting Van Houten and Krenwinkel in prison to discover how they had changed during their incarceration. The more Meredith got to know them, the more she was lured into a deeper dilemma: What compels “normal” people to do unspeakable things? The author's relationship with her subjects provides a chilling lens through which we gain insight into a particular kind of woman capable of a particular kind of brutality. Through their stories, Nikki Meredith takes readers on a dark journey into the very heart of evil.

Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788735501
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Romance of American Communism written by Vivian Gornick and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public.