Episode 15: Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm

Literary Canon Ball

In episode fifteen of Literary Canon Ball we discuss Janet Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers.

Janet Malcolm is an award-winning American writer and journalist and the author of more than ten books, including the much revered, The Journalist and the Murderer.

But it is Malcolm’s 2013 collection, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers that we’re discussing today. The collection, much of which was first published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, features sixteen essays on artists and writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Julia Margaret Cameron, JD Salinger, Edith Wharton and Cecily von Ziegesar.

Malcolm has been described as ‘among the most intellectually provocative of authors, able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.’ With her books bringing a ‘gimlet-eyed clarity to often fraught and complicated subjects and are so lean, so seamless, so powerfully direct, that read as they read as if they have been written in a single breath’

Show Notes:

Janet Malcolm, The Art of Nonfiction No. 4 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6073/janet-malcolm-the-art-of-nonfiction-no-4-janet-malcolm

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/jun/06/janet-malcolm-a-life-in-writing

Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm – review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/28/forty-one-false-janet-malcolm-review

Their Own Petard ‘Forty-One False Starts,’ by Janet Malcolm https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/books/review/forty-one-false-starts-by-janet-malcolm.html

Forty-One False Starts (essay from book) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/11/forty-one-false-starts

Forty One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, by Janet Malcolm https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/forty-one-false-starts-essays-on-artists-and-writers-by-janet-malcolm-1.1487226

FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS BY JANET MALCOLM http://therumpus.net/2014/06/forty-one-false-starts-by-janet-malcolm/

The queen of not-nice: Janet Malcolm’s ‘Forty-one False Starts’ https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/june/1370181600/amanda-lohrey/queen-not-nice-janet-malcolm-s-forty-one-false-starts

Janet Malcolm's brilliant methods are on show in 'Forty-One False Starts' http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/03/entertainment/la-ca-jc-janet-malcolm-20130505

I Read Everything Janet Malcolm Ever Published http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_completist/2013/05/janet_malcolm_review_forty_one_false_starts_journalist_and_the_murderer.html

Recommendations:

Kirby

You Can't Ask That

The Bechdel Cast podcast

Neve

Killing Eve
Interview with Sandra Oh
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/killing-eve-sandra-oh-interview
Hannah Witton blog
https://hannahwitton.com/am-i-disabled/

Fi

'The Spare Room' by Helen Garner
'Conversations with Friends' by Sally Rooney
'Madness: a memoir' by Kate Richards
'Becoming Disabled' by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/sunday/becoming-disabled.html

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