Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism'Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny' Sunday Times'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke'She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be' New YorkerJenny Diski was a fearless writer, for w...

The book about America de Tocqueville might have written had he spent some time in the nation's smoking sectionsUsing two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As she did in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of reflection a...

'I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like' EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?)What does Jenny Diski know about animals? She's really not sure. She remembers the animal books she read in her childhood; the cartoons she watched; the meals she ate; the strays she found; the animals who have lived and still live with her. She examines ...

A brilliant, alternative take on sixties swinging London, Jenny Diski offers radical reconsiderations of the social, political, and personal meaning of that turbulent era.What was Jenny Diski doing in the sixties? A lot: dropping out, taking drugs, buying clothes, having sex, demonstrating, and spending time in mental hospitals. Now, as Diski herself turns sixty years old, she examines what has been lost in the purple haze of nostalgia and selective memory of that ...

The only story collection from the beloved Jenny Diski—darkly funny, subversive, sexy, and eccentric tales from one of the most original and intelligent voices of our time"Mordant and talon-sharp." —Dwight Garner, New York Times, on Jenny DiskiDescriptionJenny Diski's prose is as sharp and steely as her imagination is wild and wondrous. When she died of cancer in April 2016, after chronicling her illness in strikingly hones...

National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable Book of the Year"Transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." --Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book ReviewFrom "one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature" (The New York Times Magazine) comes a breathtaking memoir about...

"Will make any pet owner, zoogoer or meat-eater wonder whether we really know anything about . . .other species . . .[this] book raises all the right questions." — Washington PostWhat Jenny Diski know about animals? She wasn't really sure as she began to write this memoir. But of this she is certain: our relationships with, and attitudes toward, animals are really worth thinking about.Diski sets out on her wide-ranging investigatio...

Many books have been written on the Sixties: tributes to music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. In The Sixties, Jenny Diski breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big ideas that dominated the era - liberation, permissiveness and self-invention - to consider what she and her generation were really up to. Was it rude to refuse to have sex with someone? Did they take drugs to get by, or to see the world differently? How responsible were they for the self-interest and greed of...

Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confuse...

Alla fine degli anni Novanta, Jenny Diski osserva la propria stanza da letto interamente bianca e ripensa al candore degli ospedali dove era stata ricoverata quando era una ragazza in crisi. Per lei il bianco è un sottrarsi alla vita, ai pensieri, all'incessante frastuono dei ricordi. E poco a poco diventa un desiderio prepotente, che si traduce in un piano preciso: spingersi fino in Antartide, alla ricerca del bianco assoluto, dove perdersi e dimenticare. Ma mentre il piano si realizza, i...

What if God fell in love and the person was already married? A bitter story of the very first love triangle between a man, his wife, and their GodFirst came Adam, whose fall soured His quest for absolute authority, then Noah, whose dreary sense of duty He found dull. God resolves for a third and final time to get it right, to select a vessel through whom He can direct human affairs, and to whom He can communicate directly His will. He chooses a solitary figure whose...

Bloomsbury presents Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski, read by Charlotte Randle and Chloe Diski.A tonic for the soul ... I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal' Emilia Clarke‘Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny’ Sunday Times‘She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be’ New YorkerJenny Diski was a ...