Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays
Description
A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature (The New York Times Magazine), selected by London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.
She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be. --New Yorker Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books--selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude--have been described as virtuoso performances, and small masterpieces. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated--and mordantly funny.Product Details
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About the Author
Jenny Diski was born in 1947 in London, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of ten novels, four books of travel and memoir, including Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in publications including the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, to which she contributed more than two hundred pieces over twenty-five years.
jennydiski.co.ukReviews
"The appeal of Diski's essays was the appeal of Diski herself . . . brilliant, irritable, mordant, and humane." --Paris Review
"Transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." --Heidi Julavits, The New York Times Book Review on IN GRATITUDE "Diski was a spare, beautiful, economical writer . . . [In Gratitude] is a sly reminder of the closeness of gratitude and ingratitude: the way one blends or corrodes into the other in life and in memory . . . It is the book of a born fighter." --The Wall Street Journal "The force of Jenny Diski's personality, and the penetration of her mind, are as vivid as anything in contemporary journalism." --Guardian "Savagely good company" --Daily Telegraph "Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring . . . Highly intelligent, furiously funny." --Sunday Times
