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Taking A Long Look

Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time
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( 559 ratings, 87 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
Taking A Long Look by Vivian Gornick is a collection of essays that spans several decades, showcasing the author's keen observational skills and incisive intellect. Delving into the realms of feminism, literature, and everyday life, Gornick reflects on the personal and political landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through her thought-provoking analyses, Gornick provides readers with a rich tapestry of cultural commentary.
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Format: Hardback
$4500
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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?

This book may appeal to you if you enjoy insightful and thought-provoking essays that explore feminism, politics, and culture. The author, with her sharp wit and keen observations, examines the world with a critical, reflective eye, offering depth and nuance to everyday experiences. It's perfect for those who appreciate cultural analysis with personal narratives.

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

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

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

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, All That is Given 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 All That Is Given demonstrate one of America’s most beloved critics at her best.

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?

Vivian Gornick's Taking a Long Look is highly praised for its incisive and authoritative voice, capturing the essence of personal and cultural inquiry over fifty years. Reviewers commend Gornick's ability to blend literary and personal essays with rich, expressive prose that is both direct and evocative. Her work is characterised by a deep exploration of feminist themes and cultural critique, consistently engaging readers with its blend of personal reflection and intellectual rigor. The collection is lauded for its fresh language, vibrant insights, and for showcasing Gornick's formidable intelligence and distinct sensibility.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781788739771

Publisher: Verso Books

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 16 March 2021

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Verso Books

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 23.0mm

Width: 140.0mm

Height: 210.0mm

Weight: 391g

Pages: 304

About the Author

Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Gornick was a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s, and a respected literary critic. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments - ranked the best memoir of the last fifty years by the New York Times - The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business, as well as the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.

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    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...
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  • Taking A Long Look
    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, All That is Given illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick’s work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what...
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    In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honourable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and...
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    Vivian Gornick's writing has always explored the hard truths of existence: the nature of human loneliness, and the struggle to love, work, and connect. In these seven seminal essays, Gornick chronicles the New York streets that energise her and looks back on the dangerously charged atmosphere of the Catskills where she waitressed as a student in the late fifties. She...
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