Mothers, Fathers, and Others

Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels including the international bestseller What I Loved, The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Memories of the Future, as well as five collections of essays: Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros, Living, Thinking, Looking and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. She has also published a poetry collection, Reading To You, and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.

Hustvedt has won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the European Essay Prize for her essay The Delusions of Certainty. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn, New York.

'Dizzyingly flexible, deeply human, often funny, it blasts aside our preconceptions and urges us to see the world as it is' i

Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in Siri Hustvedt's most personal essay collection yet, a scintillating and profound exploration of motherhood, the maternal and misogyny.

Ranging across artistic mothers such as Jane Austen and Louise Bourgeois, psychoanalysis, science, literature and ethnography, this is a polymath's journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art. Fierce, moving and witty, it warns against drawing hard and fast borders where none exist.

'The voice is consistent, combining assured erudition with more playful questioning, always thoughtful and capable of surprising shifts of register and even genre' Lara Feigel, Guardian



PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT:

'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie

'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear' Hilary Mantel

'Her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist . . . in this regard I feel that she resembles Virginia Woolf ' Observer

'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post