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Things I Don't Want to Know

Living Autobiography 1
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( 19,048 ratings, 2,057 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Things I Don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy is a reflective and engaging memoir that explores the intricacies of authoring and womanhood. Positioned against the backdrop of personal and political landscapes, Levy delves into her own life experiences as a writer, elucidating the influences and events that have shaped her voice. Through a rich and evocative narrative, the book offers a profound exploration of identity and resilience.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

You might enjoy this book if you're drawn to reflective and introspective stories that delve into the complexities of identity and personal history. Deborah Levy offers an evocative exploration of what shapes us, blending personal anecdotes with philosophical musings, all infused with a rich, artistic sensibility.

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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

First instalment of Levy's essential 'living autobiography' trilogy - reissued to match the beautiful The Cost of Living hardback.

Taking George Orwell's famous essay, Why I Write, as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity, and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory and shape it to her need. It is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers.

This first volume of the trilogy focuses on the writer as a young woman - the confusion and turbulence of youth, and the uncertainties of carving an identity as a writer. The second volume, The Cost of Living, speaks to the challenges of middle age as a writer and a woman - motherhood, separation, bereavement.

Series: Living Autobiography

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  • The Cost of Living
    The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy is a spellbinding blend of memoir and manifesto, an exploration of what it means to navigate modern womanhood amid the mingling tides of personal upheaval and societal change. Set during a transformative period in Levy's life, the narrative unfolds in the wake of her mother's death, the departure of her daughters from home,...
    Paperback
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  • Things I Don't Want to Know
    First instalment of Levy's essential 'living autobiography' trilogy - reissued to match the beautiful The Cost of Living hardback. Taking George Orwell's famous essay, Why I Write, as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity, and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory...
    Paperback
    $3000
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Things I Don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy is praised for its remarkable sharpness and original imagination, drawing comparisons to Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. It is noted for its feminist and political undertones, with Levy's unique style being both inspiring and poetic. Celebrated authors and reviewers highlight her originality of thought and assert that she is a writer of global calibre.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780241983089

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 05 April 2018

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 11.0mm

Width: 128.0mm

Height: 197.0mm

Weight: 129g

Pages: 176

About the Author

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy- Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Also by Deborah Levy

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  • The Cost of Living
    The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy is a spellbinding blend of memoir and manifesto, an exploration of what it means to navigate modern womanhood amid the mingling tides of personal upheaval and societal change. Set during a transformative period in Levy's life, the narrative unfolds in the wake of her mother's death, the departure of her daughters from home,...
    Paperback
    $2300
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
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    Ships late August
  • The Position of Spoons
    From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer. In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary...
    Hardback
    $4500
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    $5000
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  • Hot Milk
    Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016, Hot Milk is a hypnotic tale of female sexuality, power, and myth from the author of Swimming Home. Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness, and the doctors are mystified. Her daughter, Sofia, has brought her here to find a cure with the...
    Paperback
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  • Real Estate
    Fearless and essential – the highly anticipated final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed Living Autobiography. Following the international critical and commercial success of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Levy's Living Autobiography is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. It resumes and expands Levy's pioneering examination of a...
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  • August Blue
    The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home. At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Andersonβ€”former child prodigy, now in her thirtiesβ€”walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance. Now she is in Athens, watching as an uncannily familiar young woman purchases the last pair of mechanical dancing horses at a...
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  • The Position of Spoons
    From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer. In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary...
    Paperback
    $3000
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • August Blue
    The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home. 'If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to...
    Hardback
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  • The Man Who Saw Everything
    The unmissable, Booker Prize-longlisted novel from the critically acclaimed author of Hot Milk. In 1988, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is fine; he gets up and goes to see his girlfriend, Jennifer. They have sex and then break up. He leaves for the GDR, where he will have more sex (with several members...
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  • The Unloved
    An arresting, mysterious, hypnotising novel by the Man Booker-shortlisted writer Deborah Levy. A group of hedonistic West European tourists gather to celebrate Christmas in a remote French chateau. Then an Englishwoman is brutally murdered, and the sad, eerie child Tatiana declares she knows who did it. The subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into...
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  • Early Levy
    Back in print at last, two pioneering early works by Man Booker-shortlisted writer Deborah Levy. Beautiful Mutants Lapinski, a manipulative and magical Russian exile, summons forth a number of highly contemporary urban pilgrims. Through them, Levy explores broken dreams and self-destructive desires in a shimmering, dislocated allegory of its times. Swallowing Geography Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always...
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  • Billy & Girl
    In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time...
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  • My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
    "In one short and sly book after another, Levy writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both." Atlantic Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius - a writer who...
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