Jenny Diski

A sensual novel about companionship, heartache, and alienation. Mimi has the greatest difficulty staying awake; she nods off at the movies, during conversations with Jack, in the middle of a dinner party. She sleeps, apparently dream-free, partly escaping the demands of waking consciousness, partly submitting to the irresistible pull of "a veil of water-sodden grey mist." One cold winter night, Mimi discovers an unconscious bag lady huddled behind a London cinema. A sense of duty and curiosity prompts her to call an ambulance. Later that evening, after Jack walks out on her, Mimi withdraws to bed, wondering if the vagrant could have been someone she once knew. Could the old woman layered in filthy rags have been Leah, Mimi's abandoned and abandoning mother, in a former existence? Or perhaps it was Bella, a bomb-blast victim with a disfigured face, silenced and surgically reconstructed, but strangely and passionately loved by married Casanova. Then again, she might have been a nun, perverse and reclusive, and gifted with miraculous powers. Sensual and absorbing, "The Dream Mistress" is an intelligent novel about skepticism, love, and faith.

Diane Keaton's memories.

The 1960s was the decade America transformed from a country of conformity to a land of political, cultural, and social liberation. Looking through the lens of television, this production weaves together the events and personalities that influenced and dominated the 1960s in America, sketching a portrait of this remarkable decade that is both entertaining and illuminating.

In het leven en huwelijk van de bijbelse Abram en zijn halfzuster Sara speelt God een zeer bepalende, zelfs menselijke, rol.

""The one truly generous act of my mother's that I could really put my finger on: her leaving me alone," writes Jenny Diski of the woman she has neither seen nor heard from - to her great relief - since 1966, the year of her father's death. Both parents were suicidal, absconding hysterics who would return from mysterious stints away to play bizarre sexual games with their daughter. Life with them engendered in Diski a profound desire to escape into oblivion. As a teenager, oblivion meant heavy drug use and the white of psychiatric wards; as an adult the boundless, blank iciness of Antarctica becomes her imaginary, and ultimately her actual, haven." "Diski finds her characteristic dispassion is at risk when her own daughter, Chloe, develops a keen desire to know the fate of her missing maternal grandmother. Chloe's research efforts get serious just as Diski embarks on a ship bound for Antarctica. Her journey to the end of the world thus takes on an evocative and ironic weight, providing the ideal space and time in which to consider the possibility that her mother is still alive, time to remember herself as a child, before years of neglect and rejection hardened her heart."--Jacket.

Two complete stories in one volume include Six White Horses, in which Patty King, infatuated with Lije Masters, a married man, resents Morgan Kincaid's efforts to convince her its only a crush, and Reilly's Woman, in which a plane crash brings together beautiful Leah Talbot and pilot Reilly Smith. Original.

In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the cliches and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. In the pages of the London Review of Books , to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next-alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals -- and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers -- Lessing and herself. From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own diagnosis with cancer. Her columns in the London Review of Books -- selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, ranged from subjects as various as happiness, social psychology, self-absorption and cats -- have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'.

A collection of Diski's essays from the "London Review of Books", "The Guardian", "New Statesman" and "Observer". She reviews her own experiences, key historical figures and pertinent topics, from "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." to whether Jesus walked on water because he couldn't swim.

The author describes her journey into the heart of the United States during two cross-country trips aboard Amtrak, as she looks at herself and her own life throught the mirror of America and Americans.