My Katherine Mansfield Project [Hardcover]

In 2009, Kirsty Gunn returned to spend the winter in her hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, also the place where Katherine Mansfield grew up. In this exquisitely written “notebook,” which blends memoir, biography, and essay, Gunn records that winter-long experience and the unparalleled insight it allowed her into Mansfield’s fiction. Gunn explores the idea of home and belonging—and of the profound influence of Mansfield’s work on her own creative journey. She asks whether it is even possible to “come home”—and who are we when we get there? My Katherine Mansfield Project is a book to be treasured by anyone who has left home and moved away... [it] is an enchanting - and at times haunting - essay, as well as a moving tribute to Mansfield. The publisher, Notting Hill Editions, specializes in ‘reinvigorating the essay as a literary form’, and Kirsty Gunn’s offering is a triumph of the genre. The book is also a lovely object, stitched with red ribbon, and with a dove-grey cloth cover stamped with striking white-and-red print. Inside, the page numbers are red and chapter titles have red embellishments. It is a tribute to the book as art form; for once, one really can judge a book by its beautifully produced cover.
—Gerri Kimber, The Times Literary Supplement

I began reading it and could not put it down until I had finished...It amalgamates memory and fiction and research and journal so sensitively and in such an original way that I came away feeling [Gunn] had escaped all the old hackneyed ways of writing about influence and created something wholly her own...It really lives. All of it.
—John Carey

A beautiful and mood-provoking book...the writing went into my consciousness and I felt the loneliness, the sadness, the love and identification with Katherine Mansfield...It was beautiful.
—Jane Campion

Kirsty Gunn is a deep thinker; l3W