Coventry

ISBN: 1250619580

Author: Cusk, Rachel

Condition: Used

Product DescriptionNPR's Favorite Books of 2019Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three literary masterpieces (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions.Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Franoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. Theres a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: its called being sent to Coventry), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.Review"First-rate, marked by candor and seriousness . . . [Cusk] is a poet of split feelings. Her inquisitive intelligence is the rebar that, inside the concrete, holds the edifice upright . . . I have quoted Cusk a great deal in this review. There are more of her words here than mine . . . But sometimes you just need to get out of the way." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times"[Cusk's voice is] imbued with an authority that is all the more powerful because it is diffuse and flexible, aware of its limited perspective and willing to be measured against those of others . . . Cusk, like the best artists, has renovated her work from its deepest interior-the self-transforming her private crises into an expansive aesthetic vision." -Meaghan O'Gieblyn, The New York Times Book ReviewCusk is a brilliant, perspicacious social critic whose crisp prose is only matched by the elegance of her insights . . . [Coventry] is a daring return to her own voice . . . Luminous. -Cat Zhang, Slate[Cusk] writes like someone who has been burned and has reacted not with self-censorship but with a doubling-down on clarity. She is blazingly intelligent, a deep, tough-minded thinker . . . [whose essays] are at once freewheeling and exquisitely precise. -Heller McAlpin, NPR"Fans of Cusks prose and authorial perspective, her cutting wit and inimitable turns of phrase, will enjoy these essays . . . Bringing these writings together under one roof, so to speak, showcases Cusk as one of the 21st centurys great novelist-essayists." -Donal Harris, Los Angeles Review of Books"As in her novels, Cusk's prose in these essays is a tight guitar string or a wire from an espalier. Her descriptions . . . have a bewildering precision, a feeling of painful truthfulness." -Claire Jarvis, Bookforum"Cusks unsparing ability to see links between her own experience and broader literary and historical perspectives has always elevated her personal writing above mere memoir, and this collection cements her reputation as one of the most fierce and elegant chroniclers of how we live now." -Stephanie Merritt, The GuardianThe essays [in Coventry] chip away at Cusks preoccupations-the tenuous agreements of civility, the tension between family life and the creative process, the making of a home-from multiple angles in order to chisel towards some sort of truth . . . As the language in her work becomes more streamlined, Cusks voice in Coventry resonates loud and clear. -Mia Levitin, Financial TimesFiercely intelligent, with enviable prose that is at once luminous and precise . . . If residing in Coventry has allowed [Cusk] to write with such devastating complexity, I hope she stays there. -Kathryn Maris, New StatesmanRachel Cusk has already established herself as one of the more pro