Vivian Gornick

"As Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: "Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop." Vivian Gornick, a major figure of second-wave feminism, found particular inspiration for this struggle in the work of male writers, from H. G. Wells and Randall Jarrell to V. S. Naipual, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Roth. From these talented men who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women, but suffered endlessly from the ravages of anger and self-doubt, Gornick learned what it really means to make art while wrestling with one's inner demons." "The Men in My Life is Gornick at her best: interpreting the intimate relationship between Inner life, social history, and great literature."--BOOK JACKET.

"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.". "How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the reliable narrator who will tell the story that needs to be told? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks, and answers. Using some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Vivian Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, and Oscar Wilde.". "This book, which grew out of fifteen years of teaching in M.F.A. programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own."--BOOK JACKET.

In this book of new and collected critical essays, Vivian Gornick turns the searching intelligence and honesty of insight that mark her memoirs on the work - and the lives - of writers she admires, among them Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Christina Stead, and George Meredith. In doing so, she examines a century of novels of love-in-the-Western-world and comes to see that, for most writers, it is the drama of our angry and frightened selves in the presence of love that is our modern preoccupation.

This collection of brave personal essays finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, feminist) trying to observe herself and the world without sentiment, cynicism, or nostalgia. Whether walking along the streets of New York or teaching writing at a university, she is a woman exploring her need for conversation and connection - with men and women, colleagues and strangers. She recalls her stint as a waitress in the Catskills and a failed friendship with an older woman and mentor; she reconsiders her experiences in the feminist movement, while living alone, and in marriage. Turning her sharp eye on herself, Gornick struggles to see her part in things - how she has both welcomed and avoided contact, and how these attempts at connections have enlivened and, at times, defeated her. Unrelentingly honest, her essays remind us that we can come to know ourselves only by engaging fully with the world.

Vivian Gornick's brave and deeply moving memoir is a tour de force, a book that dissects one of life's most complex, maddening and closely entwined alliances - the relationship between mother and daughter. Heralded as a landmark in American autobiography, Fierce Attachments probes the intimate, sometimes destructive family passions that can shape a woman's childhood - and change her life forever.

COULD HE HEAL HER BROKEN HEART? What was she doing here? Hyattown had changed very little in the years Vanessa Sexton had been away. In some ways her high school sweetheart, Brady Tucker, hadn't changed much either - he was still lean, athletic, rugged... But the once reckless boy had become a solid, dependable man. He'd stood her up on the most important night of her life; could she ever trust him again? So Vanessa had finally come home, Brady thought. She could still turn him inside out with one of her sultry looks. He couldn't believe she hadn't forgiven him for that night twelve years ago--but he'd had his reasons for not showing up. He'd let her leave town then--but he wasn't going to let her get away this time....

From the first appearance of the lead essay in this collection in 1969, Vivian Gornick established herself as one of the most respected voices in the new literature of contemporary feminism. Speaking always for herself, always maintaining her independence, while at the same time reflecting and commenting upon current feminist concerns, Gornick became one of the most eagerly read writers in The Village Voice, The New York Times and other periodicals. With characteristic passion and a quick, penetrating intelligence, she dissects the culture that is at the root of female oppression. This collection will stand as a permanent record of the evolution of one feminist's personal consciousness over the seven years that paralleled the renaissance of American feminism. These are essays to be read and reread for years to come, as both men and women begin to assimilate what we have all learned from the women's movement.--From publisher description.

Interviews with American Communists who joined the Party around the 1930s and left or were expelled by the1960s.

Ms. Gornick, noted as a Women's Libber (she coedited Woman in Sexist Society) made this trip on account of a man -- Ali Mahmoud, a Harvard grad and Arab who played Romeo to her Jewish-American Juliet. Ali's family in Cairo, hosting her in his absence, advised concealment of her ethnic origins which she did for the most part, sleeping with one of his many cousins, until she let that cat out of the bag inopportunely. This particular international affair faltered, but there were others as well as other opportunities; ""Have you come here to make a sexual study of the men of Egypt?"" one of them asks, and Gornick does not deny that there were Arabs in her sexual fantasies. The book is intended as a people-tour of Cairo and environs; despite a lack of Arabic and the suspicions of a quasi-police state in a perennial attitude of semi-war, she was able to get around. One finds, however, too many mentions of her accolades ("I love your journalism. I love your womanness... We will be good friends, ya-Vivian?") and suspects, at the end, that she's really on an ego-trip in search of a "lost innocence" and happiness in which she would be hanging clothes on the line, just like her mother did. In the throes of an unfinished revolution, Egypt emerges as a bureaucratic, inefficient and poverty-stricken society; its discontented elite has copied the West of 30 years ago. But Gornick is apolitical; she's produced an edited diary of her meetings and goings, momentarily intriguing, but ultimately just girl-to-girl talk about a long vacation. -- Review from (August 30, 2016).

This volume is an anthology of articles written by some 30 female scholars and writers. Each woman draws upon mastery of her discipline and on a commitment to eliminating the social and personal costs of sexism; and also the arguments from current social customs and "Nature" that the editors feel lock both men and women into life-denying stereotypes of masculinity and femininity.

Women in Science includes scientific pioneers who came up with incredible ideas that changed the world; women who work in the fast-paced world of technology; amazing engineers who build incredible structures; and mathematical geniuses.

"A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis"--

Story of a group of Americans who seek to escape the perils of present-day life by going to the New England mountains.