In a collection of personal essays, the author shares her struggle to achieve both independence and connection with others, reconsiders feminism, living alone, and marriage, and reveals how we can come to know ourselves by participating in the world.

From an acclaimed feminist writer, essays on “loneliness . . . [the] limitations on friendship and intimacy, [honoring] the process of becoming oneself” (Mary Hawthorne, The New York Times Book Review). Seminal essays on loneliness, living in New York, friendship, feminism, and writing from nonfiction master Vivian Gornick. Vivian Gornick’s Approaching Eye Level is a brave collection of personal essays that finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, feminist) trying to observe herself and the world without sentiment, cynicism, or nostalgia. Whether walking along the streets of New York or teaching writing at a university, Gornick is a woman exploring her need for conversation and connection—with men and women, colleagues and strangers. She recalls her stint as a waitress in the Catskills and a failed friendship with an older woman and mentor, and reconsiders her experiences in the feminist movement, while living alone, and in marriage. Turning her trademark sharp eye on herself, Gornick works to see her part in things—how she has both welcomed and avoided contact, and how these attempts at connections have enlivened and, at times, defeated her. First published in 1996, Approaching Eye Level is an unrelentingly honest collection of essays that finds Gornick at her best, reminding us that we can come to know ourselves only by engaging fully with the world. “Gripping.” —Library Journal “Gornick bravely faces—and, even more remarkable, clearly renders—loneliness and the ongoing search for human connection. . . . Her prose is sharp and her characterizations—of her friends, modern life, and of herself—ring true.” —Kirkus Reviews

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years. In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick’s groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O’Brien has called “the principal crux of female despair”: the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of “urban peasants,” Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother’s romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick’s struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader’s admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter’s mother. Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre. “[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters...[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2020. One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”

A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Vivian Gornick's The End of the Novel of Love explores the meaning of love and marriage as literary themes in the twentieth century. In The End of the Novel of Love, an acclaimed and provocative collection of criticism, Gornick applies the same intelligence, honesty, and insight that define her memoirs to an analysis of love and marriage as literary themes in the twentieth century. She examines the work and lives of several authors she admires—including Grace Paley, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, George Meredith, Jane Smiley, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus—to ultimately posit that love, sexual fulfillment, and marriage are now exhausted as the metaphorical expressions of success and happiness. Spanning the depths of common experience and the expanse of twentieth century literature, Gornick crafts an argument that is as defined by discourse as it is by the power of her language, which is gracefully poised between objective knowledge and subjective experience. In these eleven essays, she comes to see that, for most writers, like most readers, it is the drama of our angry and frightened selves in the presence of love that is our modern preoccupation. The End of the Novel of Love is a strikingly original and thought-provoking collection from a canonical critic.