A Plea For Eros

Download or read book A Plea for Eros written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Picador. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers. Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James--with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.

Download or read book Living, Thinking, Looking written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Picador. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder (The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves). She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. Living, Thinking, Looking brings together thirty-two essays written between 2006 and 2011, in which the author culls insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. The book is divided into three sections: the essays in Living draw directly from Hustvedt's life; those in Thinking explore memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the pieces in Looking are about visual art. And yet, the same questions recur throughout the collection. How do we see, remember, and feel? How do we interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, dream, and speak? What is "the self"? Hustvedt's unique synthesis of knowledge from many fields reinvigorates the much-needed dialogue between the humanities and the sciences as it deepens our understanding of an age-old riddle: What does it mean to be human?

Download or read book Yonder written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-05-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meditaions on the complex relationship between art and the world.

Download or read book Mysteries of the Rectangle written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2006-08-10 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Hustvedt gives us nine essays on the significance of particular works of art, replete with original insights and a few startling discoveries. In her essay on Giorgione's The Tempest, a painting that has mystified art critics for hundreds of years, the author reinterprets the canvas as a work about art and voyeurism. While looking at The Third of May, she was astonished to discover that Goya had hidden his own self-portrait in a shadowy corner of his iconic masterwork. More than anything, the essays in this book display a true passion for art, from the still lifes of Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Giorgio Morandi to the contemporary works of Joan Mitchell and Gerhard Richter. Hustvedt captures perfectly the pleasure found in giving oneself up to the complexities and ambiguities of painting, discovering new subtleties and surprises the longer one takes the time to look.--Back cover.

Download or read book What I Loved written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful and heartbreaking novel that chronicles the epic story of two families, two sons, and two marriages Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a life-long friendship. Leo's story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the evolution of the growing involvement between his family and Bill's-an intricate constellation of attachments that includes the two men; their wives, Erica and Violet; and their children, Matthew and Mark. The families live in the same building in New York, share a house in Vermont during the summer, keep up a lively exchange of thoughts and ideas, and find themselves permanently altered by one another. Over the years, they not only enjoy love but endure loss-in one case sudden, incapacitating loss; in another, a different kind, one that is hidden and slow-growing, and which insidiously erodes the fabric of their lives. Intimate in tone and seductive in its complexity, the novel moves seamlessly from inner worlds to outer worlds, from the deeply private to the public, from physical infirmity to cultural illness. Part family novel, part psychological thriller, What I Loved is a beautifully written exploration of love, loss, and betrayal-and of a man's attempt to make sense of the world and go on living.

Download or read book The Blindfold written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iris Vegan, a young, impoverished graduate student from the Midwest, finds herself entangled with four powerful but threatening characters as she tries to adjust to life in New York City. Mr. Morning, an inscrutable urban recluse, employs Iris to tape-record verbal descriptions of objects that belonged to a murder victim. George, a photographer, takes an eerie portrait of Iris, which then acquires a strange life of its own, appearing and disappearing without warning around the city. After a series of blinding migraines, Iris ends up in a hospital room with Mrs. O., a woman who has lost her mind and memory to a stroke, but who nevertheless retains both the strength and energy to torment her fellow patient. And finally, there is Professor Rose, Iris's teacher and eventually her lover. While working with him on the translation of a German novella called The Brutal Boy, she discovers in its protagonist, Klaus, a vehicle for her own transformation and ventures out into the city again--this time dressed as a man. Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold is "...a work of dizzying intensity. . .eloquent and vivid." - Don DeLillo.

Download or read book Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective written by Christine Hoff Kraemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the past twenty years, contemporary Pagan leaders, progressive Christian and Goddess theologians, advocates for queer and BDSM communities, and therapeutic bodyworkers have all begun to speak forcefully about the sacredness of the body and of touch. Many assert that the erotic is a divinely transformative force, both for personal development and for social change. Although "the erotic" includes sexuality, it is not limited to it; access to connected nonsexual touch is as profound a need as that for sexual freedom and health. In this book, Christine Hoff Kraemer brings together an academic background in religious studies and theology with lived experience as a professional bodyworker and contemporary Pagan practitioner. Arguing that the erotic is a powerful moral force that can ground a system of ethics, Kraemer integrates approaches from queer theology, therapeutic bodywork, and sexual minority advocacy into a contemporary Pagan religious framework. Addressing itself to liberal religious people of many faiths, Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective approaches the right to pleasure as a social justice issue and proposes a sacramental practice of mindful, consensual touch.