Nobody's Looking at You: Essays

Previously uncollected essays, profiles, and literary criticism by “a vital voice in American nonfiction . . . an intensely original thinker” (The San Francisco Chronicle).

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an NPR Staff Pick

Janet Malcolm’s previous collection, Forty-One False Starts, was “unmistakably the work of a master” (The New York Times Book Review). Nobody’s Looking at You again brings together previously uncompiled pieces, mainly from the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

The title piece of this wonderfully eclectic collection is a profile of the fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose mother often said to her, “Nobody’s looking at you.” But in every piece in this volume, Malcolm looks closely and with impunity at a broad range of subjects, from Donald Trump’s TV nemesis Rachel Maddow, to the stiletto-heel-wearing pianist Yuju Wang, to “the big-league game” of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In an essay called “Socks,” the Pevears are seen as the “sort of asteroid [that] has hit the safe world of Russian Literature in English translation,” and in “Dreams and Anna Karenina,” the focus is Tolstoy, “one of literature’s greatest masters of manipulative techniques.” Nobody’s Looking at You concludes with “Pandora’s Click,” a brief, cautionary piece about e-mail etiquette that was written in the early two thousands, and that reverberates—albeit painfully—to this day.

“Every word . . . is a pleasure to read.” —The Star Tribune

“Her calm, brilliant essays are the perfect tonic for our troubled times.” —Associated Press

“[Malcolm’s] profiles of noted personalities are peerless when it comes to unraveling what makes people tick.” —The Seattle Times

“Outstanding . . . With no weak selections and several strikingly prescient ones, this collection shows its author as a master of narrative nonfiction.” —Publishers Weekly

© 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (E-bog): 9780374718251

Release date

E-bog: 4. september 2024