{"title":"Books by Elizabeth Hardwick","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780571346998","title":"Sleepless Nights","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSally Rooney: ‘High intelligence and beauty.’\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMargo Jefferson: 'Extraordinary'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eRediscover a lost American classic in this kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman's memories, with a new introduction by Eimear McBride. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am alone here in New York, no longer a \u003c\/i\u003ewe \u003ci\u003e... \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst published in \u003cb\u003e1979\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSleepless Nights\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eis a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is\u003cb\u003e Elizabeth Hardwick's \u003c\/b\u003eexperience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with 'drunks, actors, gamblers ... love and alcohol and clothes on the floor.' Here begin the erotic affairs and dinner parties, the abortions and heartbreaks, the friendships and 'people I have buried'. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the era's racism, sexism, and poverty. Above all, here is prose blurring into poetry, language to lose - and perhaps to find - yourself in.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSociety tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43201803026610,"sku":"9780571346998","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571346998_0099dec0-0a1f-4742-9806-d71ba8c95f08.jpg?v=1786015388"},{"product_id":"9780571347001","title":"Seduction and Betrayal","description":"\u003cp\u003eONE OF THE WHITE REVIEW'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eElizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection \u003ci\u003eSeduction and Betrayal\u003c\/i\u003e is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan Sontag\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick dissects the history of women and literature. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her most virtuoso work of criticism, she explores the lives of the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the destinies of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With fierce empathy and biting wit, Hardwick mines their childhoods, families, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. Shattering the barrier between writing and life, she asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst published in 1974, yet both urgently timely and timeless, \u003ci\u003eSeduction and Betrayal \u003c\/i\u003eexplodes the conventions of the essay: and the result is nothing less than a reckoning.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43201816592562,"sku":"9780571347001","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571347001.jpg?v=1786015390"},{"product_id":"9781590172872","title":"The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick","description":"\u003cp\u003eElizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUntil now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as \u003ci\u003ePartisan Review, The New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIndividual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43399877198002,"sku":"9781590172872","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781590172872.jpg?v=1786023041"},{"product_id":"9781681371542","title":"The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe first-ever collection of essays from across Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eNotable Book of 2017\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eElizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form, criticism worthy of the literature in question. In the essays collected here she covers civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, describes places where she lived and locations she visited, and writes about the foundations of American literature—Melville, James, Wharton—and the changes in American fiction, though her reading is wide and international. She contemplates writers’ lives—women writers, rebels, Americans abroad—and the literary afterlife of biographies, letters, and diaries. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, the Collected Essays gathers more than fifty essays for a fifty-year retrospective of Hardwick’s work from 1953 to 2003. “For Hardwick,” writes Pinckney, “the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.” Here is an exhilarating chronicle of that history.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302092353909,"sku":"9781681371542","price":23.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681371542_75f491f1-ab6e-4e24-94be-e53385febe32.jpg?v=1786024505"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-elizabeth-hardwick.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}