
The Absent Woman
The Genius of Janet Malcolm
Eve Sneider(Author)
WW Norton & Co (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 21. July 2026
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-1-324-07512-7 (ISBN)
Description
A titan of American letters, Janet Malcolm was a writer with a far-reaching impact and cultlike following, even as she actively opposed being a literary celebrity. For The Absent Woman, journalist Eve Sneider, one of the first to be given access to Malcolm's archive, creates a portrait of this notoriously private writer and her work, delving into the people and themes that consumed her over a fifty-year career. From questions of narrative form to cultural criticism, psychoanalysis, and the role of subjectivity, Sneider explores these obsessions of Malcolm's through her manuscript drafts, lauded but controversial books, photographs, correspondence, art, and interviews with those who knew her. The Absent Woman grapples with the ethical questions of writing biographical profiles, which led to highly publicized trials between former Freudian psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson and Malcolm, and illustrates the many ways in which Malcolm's essays and books were vehicles for Malcolm to understand herself.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
25 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-324-07512-7 (9781324075127)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Eve Sneider curated the inaugural exhibit from Malcolm's archive during her senior year at Yale. Sneider's work has been published in Wired, where she was an editor, as well as in the New York Review of Books and Lapham's Quarterly. She lives in Brooklyn.