The Odd Woman and the City

2015-05-19 Biography & Autobiography

Author : Vivian Gornick
Release : 2015-05-19
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 682/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Odd Woman and the City by : Vivian Gornick

Download or read book The Odd Woman and the City written by Vivian Gornick. This book was released on 2015-05-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments 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. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

The Odd Women

2021-05-21 Fiction

Author : George Gissing
Release : 2021-05-21
Genre : Fiction
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 286/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Odd Women by : George Gissing

Download or read book The Odd Women written by George Gissing. This book was released on 2021-05-21. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact of ‘odd’ or ‘redundant’ women, the cultural impact of ‘the new woman,’ and the opportunities for and conditions of employment in the expanding service sector of the economy. At the heart of these issues as many late Victorians saw them was a problem of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women in the population. There were more females than males, which meant that more and more women would be left unmarried; they would be ‘odd’ or ‘redundant,’ and would be forced to be independent and to find work to support themselves. In the Broadview edition, Gissing’s text is carefully annotated and accompanied by a range of documents from the period that help to lay out the context in which the book was written. In Gissing’s story, Virginia Madden and her two sisters are confronted upon the death of their father with sudden impoverishment. Without training for employment, and desperate to maintain middle-class respectability, they face a daunting struggle. In Rhoda Nunn, a strong feminist, Gissing also presents a strong character who draws attention overtly to the issues behind the novel. The Odd Women is one of the most important social novels of the late nineteenth century.

Fierce Attachments

2005-09-14 Biography & Autobiography

Author : Vivian Gornick
Release : 2005-09-14
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 006/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Fierce Attachments by : Vivian Gornick

Download or read book Fierce Attachments written by Vivian Gornick. This book was released on 2005-09-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years. 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 principal crux of female despair”: the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of “urban peasants,” Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother’s romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick’s struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader’s admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter’s mother. Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre. “[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters...[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times

The Odd Women

2021-05-14 Fiction

Author : George Gissing
Release : 2021-05-14
Genre : Fiction
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 528/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Odd Women by : George Gissing

Download or read book The Odd Women written by George Gissing. This book was released on 2021-05-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Odd Women (1893) is a novel by George Gissing. Inspired by a report of over one million more women living in Britain than men, Gissing sought to explore the societal and personal implications of unmarried life while exploring the demands of the growing feminist movement. The Odd Women is a story of romance, independence, and the pressures of society that poses important questions about convention in Victorian England while proving surprisingly relevant for our own times. After moving together to London, the unmarried Madden sisters rekindle their relationship with Rhoda, a neighbor and friend from their childhood in Clevedon. Rhoda, also unmarried, lives with Mary Barfoot, with whom she runs a secretarial school for young women. While Monica, the youngest Madden sister, is bullied into marrying Edmund Widdowson, a middle-aged brute, Rhoda rejects the advances of Mary’s cousin Everard. Opposed to marriage altogether, Rhoda is initially able to avoid the fate of Monica, who suffers in her stifling relationship with Edmund and longs for a younger, romantic man named Bevis. Striking up an affair, Monica meets secretly with Bevis while attempting to avoid the suspicions of her jealous, overbearing husband. When a detective hired by Edmund sees Monica knock on the door of Everard’s apartment, Edmund sets out to smear the innocent man’s name just as he has secured an engagement with the reluctant Rhoda. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of George Gissing’s The Odd Women is a classic work of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Situation and the Story

2002-10-11 Literary Criticism

Author : Vivian Gornick
Release : 2002-10-11
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 014/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Situation and the Story by : Vivian Gornick

Download or read book The Situation and the Story written by Vivian Gornick. This book was released on 2002-10-11. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love 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 tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

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