The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2013-06-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466848014

Lily Dahl, the young heroine of Siri Hustvedt's riveting novel, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, is a strong, beautiful and daring nineteen year old girl poised on the brink of womanhood. In the small town of Webster, Minnesota, Lily's life revolves around the Ideal Café. She lives above the café in a rented room and works there as a waitress. This is the stage Hustvedt sets for a bizarre cast of characters who frequent the café and populate Lily's life. Weaving a fascinating spell of mystery and suspense, Hustvedt recounts the erotic adventures, unexpected friendships, and inexplicable acts of madness that usher Lily into womanhood. By skillfully mixing reality and dreams, fact and fiction, past and present, Hustvedt creates a powerful world not quite real, but altogether truthful.

The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2004-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312423391

In a small Minnesota town, a tale of love and intrigue whose protagonist is Lily Dahl, a young actress. The cafe where she works is a meeting place for eccentrics and a New York artist who has come to paint them, with whom Lily has an affair. But one customer is a murderer and Lily turns sleuth.

The Blindfold

The Blindfold
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2003-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312422752

Iris Vegan, a young, impoverished graduate student from the Midwest, finds herself entangled with four powerful but threatening characters as she tries to adjust to life in New York City. Mr. Morning, an inscrutable urban recluse, employs Iris to tape-record verbal descriptions of objects that belonged to a murder victim. George, a photographer, takes an eerie portrait of Iris, which then acquires a strange life of its own, appearing and disappearing without warning around the city. After a series of blinding migraines, Iris ends up in a hospital room with Mrs. O., a woman who has lost her mind and memory to a stroke, but who nevertheless retains both the strength and energy to torment her fellow patient. And finally, there is Professor Rose, Iris's teacher and eventually her lover. While working with him on the translation of a German novella called The Brutal Boy, she discovers in its protagonist, Klaus, a vehicle for her own transformation and ventures out into the city again--this time dressed as a man. Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold is "...a work of dizzying intensity. . .eloquent and vivid." - Don DeLillo.

What I Loved

What I Loved
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2004-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466828366

A powerful and heartbreaking novel that chronicles the epic story of two families, two sons, and two marriages Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a life-long friendship. Leo's story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the evolution of the growing involvement between his family and Bill's-an intricate constellation of attachments that includes the two men; their wives, Erica and Violet; and their children, Matthew and Mark. The families live in the same building in New York, share a house in Vermont during the summer, keep up a lively exchange of thoughts and ideas, and find themselves permanently altered by one another. Over the years, they not only enjoy love but endure loss-in one case sudden, incapacitating loss; in another, a different kind, one that is hidden and slow-growing, and which insidiously erodes the fabric of their lives. Intimate in tone and seductive in its complexity, the novel moves seamlessly from inner worlds to outer worlds, from the deeply private to the public, from physical infirmity to cultural illness. Part family novel, part psychological thriller, What I Loved is a beautifully written exploration of love, loss, and betrayal-and of a man's attempt to make sense of the world and go on living.

Living, Thinking, Looking

Living, Thinking, Looking
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2012-06-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1250009588

The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder (The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves). She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. Living, Thinking, Looking brings together thirty-two essays written between 2006 and 2011, in which the author culls insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. The book is divided into three sections: the essays in Living draw directly from Hustvedt's life; those in Thinking explore memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the pieces in Looking are about visual art. And yet, the same questions recur throughout the collection. How do we see, remember, and feel? How do we interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, dream, and speak? What is "the self"? Hustvedt's unique synthesis of knowledge from many fields reinvigorates the much-needed dialogue between the humanities and the sciences as it deepens our understanding of an age-old riddle: What does it mean to be human?

Yonder

Yonder
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1998-05-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0805050116

Meditaions on the complex relationship between art and the world.

Mysteries of the Rectangle

Mysteries of the Rectangle
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2006-08-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781568986180

In this book, Hustvedt gives us nine essays on the significance of particular works of art, replete with original insights and a few startling discoveries. In her essay on Giorgione's The Tempest, a painting that has mystified art critics for hundreds of years, the author reinterprets the canvas as a work about art and voyeurism. While looking at The Third of May, she was astonished to discover that Goya had hidden his own self-portrait in a shadowy corner of his iconic masterwork. More than anything, the essays in this book display a true passion for art, from the still lifes of Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Giorgio Morandi to the contemporary works of Joan Mitchell and Gerhard Richter. Hustvedt captures perfectly the pleasure found in giving oneself up to the complexities and ambiguities of painting, discovering new subtleties and surprises the longer one takes the time to look.--Back cover.

A Plea for Eros

A Plea for Eros
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2007-04-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1429900490

From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers. Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James--with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.

Memories of the Future

Memories of the Future
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-03-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982102837

Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence A provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination from the internationally bestselling and prizewinning author of The Blazing World, Memories of the Future tells the story of a young Midwestern woman’s first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka “Minnesota,” transcribes her neighbor’s bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission. Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present. Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, Memories of the Future brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.

The Blazing World

The Blazing World
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2014-03-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476747253

Named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of the Year ** Publishers Weekly’s Best Fiction Books of 2014 ** NPR Best Books of 2014 ** Kirkus Reviews Best Literary Fiction Books of 2014 ** Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Books of 2014 ** Boston Globe’s Best Fiction of 2014 ** The Telegraph’s Best Fiction to Read 2014 ** St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Best Books of 2014 ** The Independent Fiction Books of the Year 2014 ** One of Buzzfeed’s Best Books Written by Women in 2014 ** San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2014 ** A Nancy Pearl Pick ** PopMatters.com’s Best of 2014 Fiction Winner of the 2014 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction Finalist for the 2014 Kirkus Prize Hailed by The Washington Post as “Siri Hustvedt’s best novel yet, an electrifying work,” The Blazing World is a masterful novel about perception, prejudice, desire, and one woman’s struggle to be seen. In a new novel called “searingly fresh... A Nabokovian cat’s cradle” on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, the internationally bestselling author tells the provocative story of artist Harriet Burden, who, after years of having her work ignored, ignites an explosive scandal in New York’s art world when she recruits three young men to present her creations as their own. Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by the third man, Rune. Many critics side with him, and Burden and Rune find themselves in a charged and dangerous game, one that ends in his bizarre death. An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle presented as a collection of texts, including Harriet’s journals, assembled after her death, this “glorious mashup of storytelling and scholarship” (San Francisco Chronicle) unfolds from multiple perspectives as Harriet’s critics, fans, family, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of where the truth lies. Writing in Slate, Katie Roiphe declared it “a spectacularly good read...feminism in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: richly complex, densely psychological, dazzlingly nuanced.” “Astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing” (NPR), Hustvedt’s new novel is “Blazing indeed:...with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity”(Kirkus Reviews, starred review). It is a masterpiece that will be remembered for years to come.