Vivian Gornick

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with her comrade-in-arms, Susan B. Anthony, was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to...

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to...

For general readers, Gornick, a memoirist, essayist, and critic, draws from interviews with about 100 women to describe their experiences as scientists and the contributions they made to biology, chemistry, physics, physiology, experimental psychology, and other sciences, addressing issues of discrimination and stereotypes along the way. Updated to include recent developments, this revised edition has been published on the 25th anniversary of the...

Writer and critic Vivian Gornick's long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life. "Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now...

"A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same." --

Short stories from the 1930s that remain as timely as the day they were written Falling in love. Falling out of love. Getting a job. Losing a job. Being too young. Being too old. Tess Slesinger's short stories deal with themes as timely as the day they were written. Though an activist in radical politics, her foremost concern was always with the hopes, fears, foibles, and needs of individual men and women. Her gift for subtle observation and gentle...

"Explore the treasures of The Frick Collection through the eyes of a diverse group of contemporary writers, artists and other cultural figures, from George Condo, Lydia Davis and Lena Dunham to Abbi Jacobson and Edmund White. A cultural haven for museum goers in New York and beyond, The Frick Collection holds masterpieces by some of the most celebrated artists in the Western tradition, among them Bellini, Gainsborough, Goya, Rembrandt, Vermeer and...