Judith Thurman

WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY A collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award-winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer. Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition. Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time--"a master of vivisection," as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times. "When she's done with a subject, it's still living, mystery intact."

WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY A collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award-winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer. Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition. Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time--"a master of vivisection," as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times. "When she's done with a subject, it's still living, mystery intact."

Judith Thurman's brilliant, National Book Award-winning biography of Isak Dinesen--now with a new foreword by the author A brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Dinesen's magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established her as a major twentieth-century author, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman's classic work explores Dinesen's life. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been--as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale--"a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other." Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.

In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer. Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

Oka Doner's life work shines a light on the continuing importance of art and the transformative power of our cosmic and enchanting natural world. Michele Oka Doner is one of today's foremost artists. Her prodigious career spans five decades and numerous artistic media, including sculpture, works on paper, furniture, video, jewelry, and sets and costumes. In addition, she has created over forty iconic public and private permanent art installations. They are the focus of EVERYTHING IS ALIVE. The common thread running through Oka Doner's oeuvre is her lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world, from which she derives her formal vocabulary. In EVERYTHING IS ALIVE this vocabulary hones in on magic, enchantment, and transformation as we are led through the artistic processes informing Oka Doner's prominent art installations. From Micco, the monumental concrete sculptural pavilion suffused with native greenery of the nearby Everglades to Oka Doner's haunting ceramic SoulCatchers and figurative sculptures born of clay at the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactury in Munich, to Miami International Airport, where Oka Doner's Sargassum soars overhead and her A Walk on the Beach lies at the feet of over 25 million travelers who traverse its 9,000 oceanic bronze forms each year. Four distinguished essayists, Judith Thurman, Joseph Giovannini, Cynthia Nadelman, and Gregory Volk, serve as guides through Oka Doner's evolution as an artist as seen in these installations, which are brought to life on 240 pages of stunning photographs, original process sketches, and sources of inspiration. EVERYTHING IS ALIVE offers a glimpse into the full breadth of Oka Doner's work. Above all, it shines a light on the continuing importance of art and the worldview that there is beauty to be found in all living things.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007Cleopatra's Nose is an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles, representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"--a term that, in her definition, encompasses haute couture, literature, and ruling empires. The subjects are varied--Cleopatra, Jackie Kennedy, Anne Frank; tofu, performance art, pornography--but as a whole these essays hint at the central preoccupations of a uniquely inquisitive mind.

A dazzling biography of the French literary superstar Colette, who is also the subject of a major motion picture. "A fine and intelligent biography of Colette, with her long tumultuous life and the great body of her work scrupulously considered and presented with style."--The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK AWARD - NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage with the sexy, unscrupulous Willy--a literary charlatan who took credit for her bestselling Claudine novels. Weary of Willy's sexual domination, Colette pursued an extremely public lesbian love affair with a niece of Napoleon's. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter who bored her, at forty-seven she seduced her teenage stepson, and in her seventies she contributed to the pro-Nazi press during the Occupation, even though her beloved third husband, a Jew, had been arrested by the Gestapo. And all the while, this incomparable woman poured forth a torrent of masterpieces, including Gigi, Sido, Cheri, and Break of Day. Judith Thurman, author of the National Book Award-winning biography of Isak Dinesen, portrays Colette as a thoroughly modern woman: frank in her desires, fierce in her passions, forever reinventing herself. Rich with delicious gossip and intimate revelations, shimmering with grace and intelligence, Secrets of the Flesh is one of the great biographies of our time. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by The Village Voice and Newsday " Colette] has been the subject of . . . a half-dozen significant biographies over the past thirty years. Yet this one by Judith Thurman will be hard to top. . . . Its prose is smoothly urbane, at times aphoristic, always captivating."--The Washington Post Book World "It will stand as literature in its own right."--Richard Bernstein, The New York Times " An] essential biography by a stylish writer of great sympathetic understanding and intellectual authority."--Philip Roth

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was this century's first modern woman. She arrived in Paris around 1900 as the provincial child bride of a notorious rake and brilliant literary impressario, Willy, who signed her first novels, the Claudines, as his own. They invented the erotically reckless teenage girl as we know her, and became the greatest French bestsellers of all time. When this tumultuous marriage ended, Colette went off with a high-born woman lover, the virile Marquise de Belboeuf, and embarked on a flamboyant stage career. She bared her breast to raucous applause in the French music-hall and became a celebrity of the lesbian demimonde. Until her death in 1954, she continued to rewrite the rules for loving, working, and aging. At the end of the century, her life and work still have the power to challenge the norms.