Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A 2019 NPR Staff Pick.

"Malcolm is always worth reading; it can be instructive to see how much satisfying craft she brings to even the most trivial article." —Phillip Lopate, TLS

Janet Malcolm’s previous collection, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, was “unmistakably the work of a master” (The New York Times Book Review). Like Forty-One False Starts, Nobody’s Looking at You brings together previously uncompiled pieces, mainly from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

The title piece of this wonderfully eclectic collection is a profile of the fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose mother often said to her, “Nobody’s looking at you.” But in every piece in this volume, Malcolm looks closely and with impunity at a broad range of subjects, from Donald Trump’s TV nemesis Rachel Maddow, to the stiletto-heel-wearing pianist Yuju Wang, to “the big-league game” of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In an essay called “Socks,” the Pevears are seen as the “sort of asteroid [that] has hit the safe world of Russian Literature in English translation,” and in “Dreams and Anna Karenina,” the focus is Tolstoy, “one of literature’s greatest masters of manipulative techniques.” Nobody’s Looking at You concludes with “Pandora’s Click,” a brief, cautionary piece about e-mail etiquette that was written in the early two thousands, and that reverberates—albeit painfully—to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250251084
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Janet Malcolm (1934- 2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and Forty-One False Starts, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Part I

Nobody's Looking at You 3

Performance Artist 27

Three Sisters 51

The Émigré 83

The Storyteller 96

Part II

The Art of Testifying 125

Special Needs 155

Comedy Central on the Mall 166

Pandora's Click 174

Part III

Dreams and Anna Karenina 183

Socks 197

The Master Writer of the City 210

Women at War: A Case of Sexual Harassment 230

It Happened in Milwaukee 238

Sisters, Lovers, Tarts, and Friends 249

"A Very Sadistic Man" 257

Remember the Ladies 267

"I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist" 276

Editorial Reviews

"Seeing things differently is the essence of what sets Malcolm apart. Few writers pay attention with the precision, acuity and patience she has exhibited during her career . . . Taking no particular issue with the work of her colleagues, I wish nonetheless to say that Malcolm, line to line, is a more revealing writer, one whose presence in her pieces isn’t meant to advertise the self so much as complicate the subject." —Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Book Review

"There are few writers who command the respect of their fellows more than Janet Malcolm . . . Malcolm is always worth reading; it can be instructive to see how much satisfying craft she brings to even the most trivial article . . . a collection that veers between tenderness and asperity." —Phillip Lopate, The TLS

"Malcolm is a master of nonfiction . . . In their range and verve, [the essays] confirm Malcolm’s ability as a literary journalist to connect her work to the cultural moment." —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times

"The latest collection of essays from the provocative grande dame of US journalism is spiky and prescient, predictable only in its near-constant ability to surprise: no matter how transparently Malcolm renders her nimble thought processes, each piece winds up somewhere unexpected." —Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian

"Nobody's Looking At You is brimful of all the eloquence, erudition and insight a thoughtful reader could want." —Etelka Lechozky, NPR.org

"Malcolm is rarely less than a fierce presence on the page, a relentless interrogator (or is it prosecutor?) of the people and subjects she writes about so well . . . Reading Janet Malcolm is always a pleasure and a challenge. She’ll make you think twice about people and things you thought you were sure about . . . Few writers are as good at making us linger, while at the same time cautioning us about the inherent limitations and deceptions of storytelling." —Paul Baumann, Commonweal

"The same qualities that make [Janet Malcolm] such a fearsome interlocutor also lend her essays an uncommon clarity . . . her calm, brilliant essays are the perfect tonic for our troubled times." —Ann Levin, Associated Press

"Malcolm is the undisputed queen of description." —Lucy Scholes, The TLS

"Marvelous . . . [Malcolm's] curiosity is boundless, her insights clear and original, but what really elevates her is that while she is present on the page, she resists intrusion or self-reference, keeping her keen gaze ever forward-looking." —The National Book Review (Five Hot Books)

"Reading Janet Malcolm is always a pleasure and a challenge. She'll make you think twice about people and things you thought you were sure about . . . Few writers are as good at making us linger, while at the same time cautioning us about the inherent limitations and deceptions of storytelling." —Paul Baumann, Commonweal

"Every word of Janet Malcolm’s latest nonfiction collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, is a pleasure to read, even if you have no built-in interest in her topics." —Chris Hewitt, The Minneapolis StarTribune

"[Malcolm's] profiles of noted personalities are peerless when it comes to unraveling what makes people tick. She’ll deliver the factual goods with brisk efficiency, while happily leaving mysteries in place." —Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

"Stylish, erudite essays by a doyenne of literary nonfiction." —O, the Oprah Magazine

"Malcolm is a witty maestro of nonfiction, a wizard at using simple sentences to convey sharp and complex observations, and a doyenne at surprising us with stories that stretch beyond boundaries of the containers that hold them." –Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub

"Outstanding . . . varied and witty . . . With no weak selections and several strikingly prescient ones, this collection shows its author as a master of narrative nonfiction." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A master of the craft offers up sprightly and fervent essays . . . Intelligent, savvy, and stylish literary journalism." —Kirkus

From the Publisher

Seeing things differently is the essence of what sets Malcolm apart. Few writers pay attention with the precision, acuity and patience she has exhibited during her career…Her work was hybrid before hybrid was a thing: It balances her skills as a reporter (avid, nosy attention) with those of a scholar (writing about anything, it's clear she's read everything), a literary critic (tuned to how language, written or spoken, foregrounds its maker's gifts and faults) and, above all, a storyteller. She is uncommonly concerned with finding a form that delivers the force of the story she is telling…What Malcolm seems to pine for—what all writers do and few manage to seize—is authority, the kind of understanding that only the creator, or a rare creator anyway, can claim for the stories we live. "If the world could write by itself," Isaac Babel observed, "it would write like Tolstoy." But because the world can't, we are fortunate to have Malcolm's kind of authority, one founded as much on her failures as on her successes at seeing.

The New York Times Book Review - Wyatt Mason

★ 10/15/2018
Malcolm (Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers) assembles an eclectic group of essays, mainly culled from the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, most of them from the past decade, into this outstanding collection. Varied and witty, the book includes profiles of such people as fashion designer Eileen Fisher, with her “aesthetic of elegant plainness” and concert pianist Yuja Wang, “whose tiny dresses and spiky heels” draw attention to the contrast between her petite frame and the “forcefulness she achieves at her instrument.” Several essays are literary critiques, touching on, among other points, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell’s ability to “bend actuality to artistic will” and how Tolstoy follows the “deep structures” of dream logic in Anna Karenina. Malcolm also explores the differing ways millennials and baby boomers view sexual harassment, email etiquette, and the high-stakes drama of John Roberts’s Supreme Court nomination hearings, where little was learned about his judicial philosophy, but revelations about character emerged. With no weak selections and several strikingly prescient ones, this collection shows its author as a master of narrative nonfiction. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2018-10-09

A master of the craft offers up sprightly and fervent essays.

Malcolm's latest collection is a follow-up to Forty-One False Starts (2013), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These 18 pieces, most previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books over the past 10 years, explore a pleasingly wide range of subjects. The first section consists of profiles. In the admiring titular piece, the author examines fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose clothes "look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than anxiously selected." Malcolm herself became part of Fisher's "kind of cult of the interestingly plain." A photo of the pianist Yuja Wang, an "existential prodigy," graces the cover of the book and is the subject of "Performance Artist." Malcolm seems as much impressed with the "characteristically outré," extremely short and tight dresses Wang wears when performing, accompanied by a pair of "sadistic high heels," as she is with Wang's musical brilliance. Things quiet down in "Three Sisters," about New York City's Argosy Bookshop and the accomplished women who run it. Then there's the "current sweetheart of liberal cable TV," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; the author calls Maddow's show "TV entertainment at its finest." The second section has cultural takes, most with a political edge. Malcolm is struck by the "atmosphere of a cold war propaganda film" in the cable TV docuseries Sarah Palin's Alaska. The author's incisive article sorting out the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings' hijinks is especially timely and scathing, while "Pandora's Click" examines "email's evil," more "like a dangerous power tool" than "harmless kitchen appliance." The last section covers literature and book reviews: Tolstoy, Constance Garnett's translations (which Malcolm loves), the Bloomsbury Group, Ted Hughes, and a resuscitating assessment of Norman Podhoretz's memoir Making It. Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are a "literary confection of…gossamer deliciousness."

Intelligent, savvy, and stylish literary journalism.

Kirkus Reviews