About this item
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.
About the Author
Janet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at . She is the author of and , as well as biographies of , and The Modern Library chose her controversial book - with its - as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century. Her most recent book is
