Virtual Event: Siri Hustvedt

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes award-winning novelist and essayist SIRI HUSTVEDT—author of The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women—for a discussion of her latest essay collection, Mothers, Fathers, and Others. She will be joined in conversation by DANIELLE SPENCER, author and Academic Director of the Columbia University Narrative Medicine Program.

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About Mothers, Fathers, and Others

Described as “a 21st-century Virginia Woolf” in the Literary Review (UK), Man Booker longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath’s journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art.

This moving, fierce, and often funny book is finally about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.

Praise for Mothers, Fathers, and Others

“Hustvedt is a transporting storyteller . . . a mind-revving investigative thinker and a commanding essayist who stirs the waters, overturns stones, opens curtains, and lifts veils with authority, refinement, and cogency.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Another outstanding compilation of essays from Hustvedt . . . Brilliant and utterly transfixing." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Profound.... Hustvedt pulls from psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and art criticism to make brilliant connections among her takes on the world. Fans of Hustvedt’s work will welcome this, and those less familiar will delight in discovering her witty, lavish style." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)