Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory
Janet Malcolm
Jun 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Maria Tucci
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4 hr 21 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life—a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be.
Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own.
Still Pictures begins with the image of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague for New York at the age of five in 1939. From her fitful early loves, to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama.
Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own.
Still Pictures begins with the image of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague for New York at the age of five in 1939. From her fitful early loves, to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama.
For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own l...
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About the author
Writer and broadcaster Ian Frazier was born in Ohio and educated at Harvard University, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. After his graduation he joined The New Yorker staff and frequently contributes to The Atlantic Monthly. His writing collections Dating Your Mom and Coyote V. Acme earned him a Thurber Prize for American Humor. The Great Plains won a 1990 Spur Award for Nonfiction from the Western Writers of America. Frazier has appeared on the National Public Radio Program A Prairie Home Companion and has acted in Smoke and Blue in the Face, both of which are Wayne Wang and Paul Auster films.
Writer and broadcaster Ian Frazier was born in Ohio and educated at Harvard University, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. After his graduation he joined The New Yorker staff and frequently contributes to The Atlantic Monthly. His writing collections Dating Your Mom and Coyote V. Acme earned...
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