num_pages: 320
description: A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for CriticismA deeply Malcolmian volume on painters photographers writers and critics.Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein are canonical in the realm of nonfictionas is the title essay of this collection with its forty-one false starts or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is among the most intellectually provocative of authors writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.Here in Forty-one False Starts Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters photographers writers and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the passionate collaborations behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth who is haunted by the Nazi past yet whose photographs have a lightness of spirit. In The Woman Who Hated Women Malcolm delves beneath the onyx surface of Edith Wharton's fiction while in Advanced Placement she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In Salinger's Cigarettes Malcolm writes that the pettiness vulgarity banality and vanity that few of us are free of and thus can tolerate in others are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines. Over and over as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction she has demonstrated that nonfictiona book of reporting an article in a magazine something we see every daycan rise to the highest level of literature.One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013
language: English
title: Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux