Living, Thinking, Looking

"No one writing about art today comes closer than Siri Hustvedt to the elusive strangeness of a great painting."—Calvin Tomkins

"She brings both knowledge and an artist's insight to the discussion of memory, language, and personal identity . . . It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear."—Hilary Mantel, The Guardian (UK)

"Hustvedt thinks her way through complex subject matter with the effortless clarity of a poised and skeptical outsider who has little time for nonsense or the blithe reductionist certainties of supposed experts . . . Hustvedt is a calm traveler on the storm-tossed seas of the self. Her odyssey . . . deepens understanding."—Lisa Appignanesi, The Independent

"As an essayist she is perhaps without peer."—The Scotland Herald

"[Hustvedt] gives you the illusion of seeing as if for the first time works of art that you thought you knew well. After reading her . . . most prose about art seems merely perfunctory."—Modern Painters

"Siri Hustvedt, one of our finest novelists, has long been a brilliant explorer of brain and mind."—Oliver Sacks

"Siri Hustvedt trains a formidable intellect on difficult subjects (the structure of the brain, the nature of perception), with an engaging personal touch that invites a general readership . . . at once stimulating and warmhearted, with sentences of drop-dead beauty and acuity on nearly every page."—Kirkus Reviews

"Hustvedt . . . gathers 32 pieces, written over the past six years, that she says are linked by an abiding curiosity about 'what it means to be human.' A lifelong migraine sufferer, Hustvedt recounts a rare pre-migraine hallucination in which she watched, with fascination and an amiable tenderness, a miniature, pink version of Paul Bunyan and his ox, Babe, two legendary, oversized characters from her Minnesota childhood. In another piece, Hustvedt describes how, to research her novel The Sorrows of an American, narrated by a New York City psychoanalyst, she interviewed analysts, read countless memoirs of mental illness, taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, and thought of her narrator as her imaginary brother who worked 'at a job I could imagine having had in another life.' Fascinated by the emotional power of the work of painter and sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Hustvedt describes how that artist's gift is taking viewers to 'strange and hidden places' in themselves, her oeuvre stirring up old pains and fears and echoing Hustvedt's own obsessions with rooms, dolls, missing limbs, mirrors, violence, order, and ambiguity. Hustvedt's essays are always perceptive, erudite, and also quite rarefied."—Publishers Weekly