Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing Contributor(s): Levy, Deborah (Author) |
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ISBN: 163557224X ISBN-13: 9781635572247 Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing OUR PRICE: $15.29 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: July 2018 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | American - General - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Social Science | Women's Studies |
Dewey: 810.9 |
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 5.4" W x 8.2" (0.30 lbs) 128 pages |
Themes: - Sex & Gender - Feminine - Cultural Region - British Isles |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, to publish alongside her new work of nonfiction, The Cost of Living. Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter--political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm--and Levy's newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective. As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK where she played at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye. Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the writer at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the reader into a writer's heart. |
Contributor Bio(s): Levy, Deborah: - Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts before becoming a playwright. Her plays include Pax, Heresies, Clam, Call Blue Jane, Shiny Nylon, Honey Baby Middle England, Pushing the Prince into Denmark and Macbeth-False Memories. She has also written some novels and was a Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991. |