Siri Hustvedt Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Blindfold (1992)
  2. The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
  3. What I Loved (2003)
  4. The Sorrows of an American (2008)
  5. The Summer Without Men (2011)
  6. The Blazing World (2014)
  7. Memories of the Future (2019)

Collections

Non fiction

  1. Yonder (1998)
  2. Mysteries of the Rectangle (2005)
  3. A Plea for Eros (2005)
  4. The Shaking Woman, Or, a History of My Nerves (2010)
  5. Margaret Bowland (2011)
  6. Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)
  7. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women (2016)
  8. Delusions of Certainty (2017)
  9. Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021)

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Collections Book Covers

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Siri Hustvedt Books Overview

The Blindfold

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.

The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

The protagonist of Siri Hustvedt’s astonishing second novel is a hero*ine of the old style: tough, beautiful, and brave. Standing at the threshold of adulthood, she enters a new world of erotic adventure, profound but unexpected friendship, and inexplicable, frightening acts of madness. Lily’s story is also the story of a small town Webster, Minnesota where people are brought together by a powerful sense of place, both geographical and spiritual. Here gossip, secrets, and storytelling are as essential to the bond among its people as the borders that enclose the town.

The real secret at the heart of the book is the one that lies between reality and appearances, between waking life and dreams, at the place where imagination draws on its transforming powers in the face of death.

What I Loved

A powerful and heartbreaking novel that chronicles the epic story of two families, two sons, and two marriages 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.

The Sorrows of an American

The Sorrows of an American is a soaring feat of storytelling about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another

When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father’s papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. The Sorrows of an American tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister uncover its secrets and unbandage its wounds in the year following their father s funeral.

Returning to New York from Minnesota, the grieving siblings continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik s fascination with his new tenants and emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients threaten to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, a famous novelist. As each new mystery unfolds, Erik begins to inhabit his emotionally hidden father s history and to glimpse how his impoverished childhood, the Depression, and the war shaped his relationship with his children, while Inga must confront the reality of her husband s double life.

A novel about fathers and children, listening and deafness, recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent, the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. Siri Hustvedt s exquisitely moving prose reveals one family s hidden sorrows through an extraordinary mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself.

The Summer Without Men

‘And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.’ Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a pause. This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her her mother and her close friends, the Five Swans, and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

Yonder

Sparkling essays on a variety of subjects literature, art, popular culture, autobiography by a renowned young American novelist. In her brilliant and daring novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, Siri Hustvedt has won critical acclaim and a rapidly expanding international audience. But she is also a wide ranging essayist and critic, frequently reexamining in her fascinating nonfiction many of the central leitmotifs of her fiction. The six pieces in Yonder, Hustvedt’s first book of essays, are all meditations on the complex relationship between art and the world. They include a personal essay on memory and place, which investigates the images we retain from our lives, the lives of others in the world, and the lives of characters in books. In ‘Vermeer’s Annunciation,’ Hustvedt gives an entirely original interpretation of the Vermeer painting Woman with a Pearl Necklace. In ‘Ghosts at the Table,’ she examines the essence of still life as a genre in painting from Cotan and Chardin to Philip Guston. Other essays include a profound piece about Dickens, a reas*sessment of The Great Gatsby, and a witty and provocative assault on contemporary pieties entitled ‘A Plea for Eros.’

Mysteries of the Rectangle

Bestselling novelist Siri Hustvedt’s inspired collection of essays on painting is now available in paperback. In Mysteries of the Rectangle, Hustvedt concentrates her narrative gifts on the works of such masters as Francisco Goya, Jan Vermeer, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Gerhard Richter, and Joan Mitchell. Through her own personal experiences, Hustvedt is able to reveal things hidden until now in plain sight: an egglike detail in Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace and the many hidden self-portraits in Goya’s series of drawings, Los Caprichos, as well as in his famous painting The Third of May. Most importantly, these essays exhibit the passion, thrill, and sheer pleasure of bewilderment a work of art can produce-if you simply take the time to look.

A Plea for Eros

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.

The Shaking Woman, Or, a History of My Nerves

In this unique neurological memoir Siri Hustvedt attempts to solve her own mysterious conditionWhile speaking at a memorial event for her father in 2006, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Despite her flapping arms and shaking legs, she continued to speak clearly and was able to finish her speech. It was as if she had suddenly become two people: a calm orator and a shuddering wreck. Then the seizures happened again and again. The Shaking Woman tracks Hustvedt’s search for a diagnosis, one that takes her inside the thought processes of several scientific disciplines, each one of which offers a distinct perspective on her paroxysms but no ready solution. In the process, she finds herself entangled in fundamental questions: What is the relationship between brain and mind? How do we remember? What is the self? During her investigations, Hustvedt joins a discussion group in which neurologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and brain scientists trade ideas to develop a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. She volunteers as a writing teacher for psychiatric in patients at the Payne Whitney clinic in New York City and unearths precedents in medical history that illuminate the origins of and shifts in our theories about the mind body problem. In The Shaking Woman, Hustvedt synthesizes her experience and research into a compelling mystery: Who is the shaking woman? In the end, the story she tells becomes, in the words of George Makari, author of Revolution in Mind, a brilliant illumination for us all.

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