'A profound book about the intrication of literature and life, about the modest, miraculous ways art helps us to live' Garth Greenwell 'I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift' Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard In her fiction, Claire Messud 'has specialised in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives' (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own life: a ...
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'A profound book about the intrication of literature and life, about the modest, miraculous ways art helps us to live' Garth Greenwell 'I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift' Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard In her fiction, Claire Messud 'has specialised in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives' (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-nine intimate, brilliant and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of 'a single successful sentence'. Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again 'an absolute master storyteller' (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).
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Add this copy of Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I to cart. $3.38, new condition, Sold by PlumCircle rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from West Mifflin, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2021 by Fleet.
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New. Arranged in three parts, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens with Claire's most personal essays-reflections on a childhood divided between cultures, and between dueling models of womanhood. It is here, in these early years, that we see the seeds of Messud's inquiry into the precarious nature of girlhood, the role narrative plays in giving shape to a life and the power of language. As the book progresses, we then see how these questions translate into Messud's rich body of criticism. In sections on literature and visual arts, Claire opens up the 'radical strangeness' of childhood in Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO; the search for the self in Saul Friedlander; the fragility and danger of girlhood captured by Sally Mann; and the search for justice in Valeria Luiselli's THE LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE. But it is the idea of the relationship between form and meaning to which this collection returns again and again. It is 'the tension between form and freedom-the paradox that fierce constraint, or restraint, [that] can allow for the greatest liberty'. As she writes, in a time 'in which our ideals appear shattered and abandoned', it is in the return to language and to stories that 'we return to the essentials that make us human. It is to find the past and the present restored, and with them, the possibility of the future'.
Add this copy of Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I to cart. $16.98, new condition, Sold by Booksplease rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Southport, MERSEYSIDE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2020 by Fleet.
