Living, Thinking, Looking Essays

The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt, has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting ( Mysteries of the Rectangle,2005) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder ( The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, 2010). She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the 39th annual Freud lecture in Vienna. Living, Thinking, Lookingbrings together thirty-one essays written between 2006 and 2011, in which the author culls insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. The book is divided into three sections: the essays in Livingdraw directly from Hustvedt's life; those in Thinkingexplore memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the pieces in Lookingare about visual art. And yet, the same questions recur throughout the collection. How do we see, remember, and feel? How do we interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, dream, and speak? What is "the self"? Hustvedt's unique synthesis of knowledge from many fields reinvigorates the much needed dialogue between the humanities and the sciences as it deepens our understanding of an age-old riddle: What does it mean to be human?

Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English literature and is the internationally acclaimed author of five novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, The Blindfold, and The Summer Without Men, as well as a growing body of nonfiction including, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle, and an interdisciplinary investigation of the body and mind in The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna.She lives in Brooklyn.

 

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

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

"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

"[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

"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