In Favor of the Sensitive Man


Book Description

Essays, lectures, and interviews—on everything from gender relations to Ingmar Bergman to adventure travel—from the renowned diarist. In this collection, the author known for “one of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters” shares her unique perceptions of people, places, and the arts (Los Angeles Times). In the opening group of essays, “Women and Men,” Anaïs Nin provides the kind of sensitive insights into the feminine psyche and relations between the sexes that are a hallmark of her work. In “Writing, Music, and Films,” she speaks as an artist and critic—in book and film reviews, an essay on the composer Edgard Varèse, a lecture on Ingmar Bergman, and the story of her printing press. In the final section, “Enchanted Places,” Nin records her travels to such destinations as Fez and Agadir in Morocco, Bali, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia—and she concludes with a charming vignette titled “My Turkish Grandmother.”




In Favour of the Sensitive Man


Book Description

Here, in more than twenty essays, Nin shares her unique perceptions of people, places, and the arts. Includes several lectures and two interviews.










Affairs to Remember


Book Description




Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History


Book Description

Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history of responses to the experience and exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the concept explores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, the Romantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythology constructed around the figure of the "weaker vessel" and it considers related notions such as im-potentiality, a "syntax of weakness" and human vulnerability in the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's study challenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength and force and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics.




The Penguin Modern Classics Book


Book Description

The essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world For six decades the Penguin Modern Classics series has been an era-defining, ever-evolving series of books, encompassing works by modernist pioneers, avant-garde iconoclasts, radical visionaries and timeless storytellers. This reader's companion showcases every title published in the series so far, with more than 1,800 books and 600 authors, from Achebe and Adonis to Zamyatin and Zweig. It is the essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world, and the companion volume to The Penguin Classics Book. Bursting with lively descriptions, surprising reading lists, key literary movements and over two thousand cover images, The Penguin Modern Classics Book is an invitation to dive in and explore the greatest literature of the last hundred years.




Writers on Writing


Book Description

Writers on Writing brings together a plethora of phrases, quotable lines, quips and putdowns about the writing process. Arranged in themes that follow the stages from idea to final publication and beyond, this little book of quotations brings together words of wisdom and withering wit from famous and infamous writers across the ages about their own work and that of fellow writers. Themes on the publishing process include: getting started, first drafts, agents, editing, publication day, book tours; and on different genres, forms and writing styles, such as plot, character, dialogue. Other topics covered are: rivals, censorship, writer's block, spelling, fame, money, plagiarism, and alcohol. The quotations are accompanied by their original source (where known), date and a short writer biographical note. ''A writer is a person who writes.'' John Braine ''Our book is found to be a drug, no man needs it or heeds it. In the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies.'' Charlotte Brontë ''How rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers! They are always implying, 'I am capable of higher things'.'' E.M. Forster




Women, Men and Eunuchs


Book Description

The collected papers in this volume present a unique introduction both to the history of women, of men and eunuchs, or the third sex, in Byzantium and to the various theoretical and methodological approaches through which the topic can be examined. The contributors use evidence from both texts and images to give a wide-ranging picture of the place of women and Byzantine society and the perceptions of women held by that society. Women, Men and Eunuchs offers a unique and valuable exploration of the issue of gender in Byzantium, which will fascinate anyone interested in ancient and medieval history and gender studies.




Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity


Book Description

Helen Tookey presents a new study of Anais Nin (1903-77), focusing both on the cultural and historical contexts in which her work was produced and received, and on the different versions of Nin herself - as a modernist, a woman writer, a public (and controversial) figure in the women'sliberation movement, and as a set of conflicting and often extreme representations of femininity. The author shows how contextual feminist approaches shed light on Nin (who moved from Paris modernism of the 1930s to US second-wave feminism of the 1970s), and how this sheds light on key issues andconflicts within feminist thinking since the 1970s, particularly questions of identity, femininity, and psychoanalysis. Anais Nin: Fictionality and Femininity provides new readings of Nin through contemporary feminist approaches, using Nin to make an intervention into critical debates aroundmodernism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, writing and identity, fictionality and femininity.