Nobody's Looking at You

ANew York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A 2019 NPR Staff Pick. "Malcolm is always worth reading; it can be instructive to see how much satisfying craft she brings to even the most trivial article." --Phillip Lopate,TLS Janet Malcolm's previous collection,Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, was "unmistakably the work of a master" (The New York Times Book Review). LikeForty-One False...
More Description

ANew York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A 2019 NPR Staff Pick.

"Malcolm is always worth reading; it can be instructive to see how much satisfying craft she brings to even the most trivial article." --Phillip Lopate,TLS

Janet Malcolm's previous collection,Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, was "unmistakably the work of a master" (The New York Times Book Review). LikeForty-One False Starts,Nobody's Looking at You brings together previously uncompiled pieces, mainly fromThe New YorkerandThe 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 seenas 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 Youconcludes 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.