Janet Malcolm

In the winter of 1996, Janet Malcolm received a letter from a stranger--a disbarred lawyer named Sheila McGough, who had recently been released from prison, and who wrote that she had been convicted of crimes she had not committed. Malcolm decided to look into the case, and this book--a dazzling work of journalism as well as a searching meditation on character, on the law, and on the incompatibility of narrative with truth--is the product of her growing belief that a miscarriage of justice had taken place. Sheila McGough was prosecuted and convicted because the government (and then the jury) interpreted her zealous representation of a con-man client named Bob Bailes as collaboration in his fraud. Malcolm's close readings of court records and her interviews with lawyers and businessmen connected with the case give a picture of American law and American cupidity that is startling in its pitiless specificity. And her portrait of Sheila McGough--"a woman of almost preternatural honesty and decency," as well as maddening literal-mindedness and discursiveness--brings an unconventional new heroine into vivid being.

"From one of our most elegantly controversial writers, here is a retrospective of essays, reviews, and profiles that reflects the range and depth of her engagement with psychoanalysis, criticism, art, and literature." "Janet Malcolm is perhaps best known for her writings on psychoanalysis, and here, in several essays, she addresses the subject with her usual erudition and lively skepticism, examining aspects of that "absurdist collaboration," the psychoanalytic dialogue, from which come "small, stray self-recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions . . . that no other human relationship could survive." In a selection of book reviews, Malcolm takes up such subjects as Tom Wolfe's vendetta against modern architecture, Milan Kundera's literary experiments, Vaclav Havel's prison letters, the art of autobiography, and a Victorian literary scandal. In the title essay, she expresses her conviction that the best criticism is "an exercise in excess and provocation," a process of "disfiguring the work of art almost beyond recognition" that allows us to see it in a radically new way." "In the final section, Malcolm gives us three extended portraits. She observes from behind "The One-Way Mirror" the work of Salvador Minuchin, pioneer and leading exponent of the inherently unorthodox practice of family therapy; she follows a former Czech dissident through the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague; and in "A Girl of the Zeitgeist," she brilliantly evokes the New York art world with her profile of a quintessential art insider, the engagingly grave Ingrid Sischy." "Each piece in this collection displays the incisive quizzicality and dazzling epigrammatic style that are the hallmarks of the writer whom Harold Bloom (speaking of Malcolm's In the Freud Archives) has called "the calmly rational Alice in this Wonderland.""--BOOK JACKET.

Explores the psychopathology of journalism.

This book is a lively narrative about the efforts of a couple of young scholars to gain access to the private letters and archives of Sigmund Freud, being protected by his daughter Anna Freud.

212 p. : 23 cm

L'embargo imposé par la psychanalyse sur sa propre histoire ne date pas d'hier : aux autodafés par lesquels Freud lui-même effaça les traces de sa propre évolution devait succéder ce savant dosage de collecte de documents inédits, de censure et de mise sous scellés qu'on nomme les "Archives Freud" : un trésor excitant la convoitrse des milieux psychanalytiques, comme s'il s'agissait de l'or du Rhin. Pour mener l'assaut de cette citadelle, jalousement protégée par deux vénérables cerbères, Kurt Eissler et Anna Freud, la marginalité, la séduction et l'audace devaient réussir là où le sérieux avait échoué. Ce livre est donc le récit d'une improbable et tragi-comique rencontre entre trois hommes : K.R. Eissler, brillant et vénérable psychanalyste ; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, infatigable sanskritiste converti à la psychanalyse avant de tourner à l'anti-freudisme le plus virulent ; et Peter Swales, autodidacte espiègle et mystérieux, qui fut un temps assistant des Rolling Stones avant de s'intéresser à la vie privée de Freud. L'ascension de Masson au poste de prince héritier de Eissler, et celle de Swales à une position moins importante, certes, mais encore plus improbable peut-être, forment la matrice de la dialectique ironique de ce livre - du jeu des fantasmes et de la réalité, de la séduction et de la trahison, de l'amour et de la haine. Mais une autre ironie reste cachée à tous les protagonistes : cette " séduction infantile " répudiée par les uns, adulée par les autres, qui donc en connaÎt la théorie dont Freud fut l'inventeur?

In this book, the author brings together essays published over the course of several decades that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. The title essay, with its forty-one "false starts," depicts her serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle.

Provides programs for drawing a variety of pictures on an Apple IIe computer.

Two novels exploring the twin faces of love and madness, loss and regeneration.

Malcolm's riveting new book tells the story of a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention.