A Plea for Eros: Essays [Paperback]

From the author of the international bestsellerWhat I Loved,a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers.

Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James--with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.

Siri Hustvedtis the author ofTheBlindfoldandThe Enchantment of Lily Dahl, which are available from Picador. Her essays on art,Mysteries of the Rectangle, are available from Princeton Architectural Press. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, Paul Auster.

Clear, elegant writing ... Readers will find both emotional and intellectual resonance in Hustvedt's deeply personal essays. Publishers Weekly

As accomplished and intelligent as the author's fiction--which is saying a lot. Kirkus Reviews

Yonder

A Plea for Eros

Franklin Pangborn: An Apologia

Eight Days in a Corset

Being a Man

Leaving Your Mother

Living with Strangers

9/11, or One Year Later

The Bostonians: Personal and Impersonal Words

Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment

Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self