Bøger af Vivian Gornick

Gornick har skrevet sine isnende og dybt bevægende erindringer “Voldsomme bånd” om forholdet til sin moder. De er skrevet med en nøgternhed og hudløshed, som gør dem ganske enkelt fremragende. En målestok for litteratur om forholdet mellem mødre og døtre.Fra bogens forord af Leonora Christina Skov:For mig og mange andre forfattere af erindringsbøger har “Voldsomme bånd” været en ledestjerne.I et nutidsspor fører Gornick og moren lange samtaler, mens de spadserer rundt i et New York, der lyder som noget fra en cool Woody Allen-film. De bor tæt på hinanden på Manhattan og ses ofte, selv om de dårligt kan holde hinanden ud.“Voldsomme bånd” er memoirerskrivning i verdensklasse. En perfekt økonomiseret erindringsbog, der kombinerer en troværdig fortællerstemme med en stærk coming of age-historie og et modigt portræt af en dominerende, charmerende og uudholdelig mor og en datter under the influence.Om fatteren:Hun er stort set ukendt i Europa (udkom 2015 i England og netop udkommet i Frankrig og på vej i Norge), men lidt af en myte i USA. Ofte beskrevet som den mest ukendte af USA's store forfatter. Hun hedder Vivian Gornick (f. 1935).

Vivian Gornick's relationship with her mother is difficult. At the age of forty-five, she regularly meets her mother for strolls along the streets of Manhattan. Occasionally they'll hit a pleasant stride - fondly recalling a shared nostalgia or chuckling over a mutual disgust - but most often their walks are tinged with contempt, irritation, and rages so white hot her mother will stop strangers on the street and say, 'This is my daughter. She hates me'. Weaving between their tempestuous present-day jaunts and the author's memories of the past, Gornick traces her lifelong struggle for independence from her mother - from growing up in a blue-collar tenement house in the Bronx in the 1940s, to newlywed grad student, to established journalist - only to discover the many ways in which she is (and always has been) her mother's daughter. Fierce Attachments is a searingly honest and intimate memoir about coming of age in a big city, and the perpetual bonds that keep us forever linked to our family. 'Admired, rightly, as "e;timeless"e; and "e;classic"e; . . . Fierce Attachments demands honour as the work of a breathtaking technician.' - Jonathan Lethem 'A fine, unflinchingly honest book . . . The story of an abiding, difficult love, full of grace and fire.' - New York Times 'Brimming with life . . . Fierce Attachments is a work of emotional cartography, charting influences and mapping out a proximate territory of the Self.' - Los Angeles Times 'One hesitates to traffic in such stock reviewer's adjectives as "e;brilliant"e;, "e;an American classic"e;, but there are only so many words with which to say how very good this book is.' - Washington Post

Presents a collection of the year's best essays as selected by author and critic Vivian Gornick.

"Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, [this book] 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"--Bac

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of LoveAll 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 "e;I"e; 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.

Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.

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.

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. She examines the work and lives of several authors she admires-including Grace Paley, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, George Meredith, Jane Smiley, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus-to ultimately posit that love, sexual fulfillment, and marriage are now exhausted as the metaphorical expressions of success and happiness.Spanning the depths of common experience and the expanse of twentieth century literature, Gornick crafts an argument that is as defined by discourse as it is by the power of her language, which is gracefully poised between objective knowledge and subjective experience. In these eleven essays, she comes to see that, for most writers, like most readers, it is the drama of our angry and frightened selves in the presence of love that is our modern preoccupation. The End of the Novel of Love is a strikingly original and thought-provoking collection from a canonical critic.

One of our most vital and incisive writers on literature, feminism, and knowing one's self

One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her lifeI 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.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton-along with her comrade-in-arms, Susan B. Anthony-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 and life make clear why feminism as a liberation movement has flourished here as nowhere else in the world.Born in 1815 into a conservative family of privilege, Stanton was radicalized by her experience in the abolitionist movement. Attending the first international conference on slavery in London in 1840, she found herself amazed when the conference officials refused to seat her because of her sex. At that moment she realized that "In the eyes of the world I was not as I was in my own eyes, I was only a woman." At the same moment she saw what it meant for the American republic to have failed to deliver on its fundamental promise of equality for all. In her last public address, "The Solitude of Self," (delivered in 1892), she argued for women's political equality on the grounds that loneliness is the human condition, and that each citizen therefore needs the tools to fight alone for his or her interests.Vivian Gornick first encountered "The Solitude of Self" thirty years ago. Of that moment Gornick writes, "I hardly knew who Stanton was, much less what this speech meant in her life, or in our history, but it I can still remember thinking with excitement and gratitude, as I read these words for the first time, eighty years after they were written, 'We are beginning where she left off.' "The Solitude of Self is a profound, distilled meditation on what makes American feminism American from one of the finest critics of our time.