Pl. Catalunya, 39-41 08820 El Prat de Llobregat T 93.370.51.52 b.prat.am@diba.es Horari: dilluns de 15.30 a 21 Dimarts a divendres de 10 a 21 Dissabtes de 10 a 19
February 2012
ENGLISH READING CLUB
ENJOY READING! SIRI HUSTVEDT The summer without men
SIRI HUSTVEDT (19 Feb. 1955, Northfield,Minnesota) ----------------------------------- BIOGRAPHY Siri Hustvedt attended public school in her hometown Northfield, Minnesota and received a degree from the Cathedral School in Bergen, Norway, in 1973. Hustvedt graduated from St. Olaf College with a B.A. in History in 1977. She moved to New York City to attend Columbia University as a graduate student in 1978. Her first published work was a poem in The Paris Review. A small collection of poems, Reading to You, appeared in 1982 with Station Hill Press. She met her husband, the writer Paul Auster in 1981, and they were married the following year. She completed her PhD in English at Columbia in 1986. Her dissertation on Charles Dickens, Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend, is an exploration of language and identity in the novel, with particular emphasis on Dickens’ metaphors of fragmentation, his use of pronouns, and their relation to a narrative, dialogical conception of self. She refers in the dissertation to sources that would influence and reappear in her later writing, including the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mary Douglas, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva. Hustvedt and Auster’s daughter, Sophie Hustvedt Auster, the singer and actress, was born in 1987. After finishing her dissertation, Hustvedt began writing prose. Two stories of the four that would become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines] and later included in Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991. Since then she has continued to write fiction and publish essays on visual art but also on diverse interdisciplinary subjects that investigate the intersections among philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. http://sirihustvedt.net/
-----------The summer without men (2011) Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,”the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.
---------------------------------------SELECTED WORKS Novel •
The blindfold (1992)
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The Enchantment Of Lily Dahl (1996)
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What I loved (2003)
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The sorrows of an American, (2009)
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The summer without men (2011)
Poetry •
Reading to you (1982)
Other works •
Yonder (1998)
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Mysteries of the Rectangle (2005)
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A plea for Eros (2005)
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The shaking woman, or a History of my nerves (2010)