Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781526621900)

A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature (The New York Times Magazine), selected by London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.

She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be. --New Yorker

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books--selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude--have been described as virtuoso performances, and small masterpieces.

From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated--and mordantly funny.

Author: Jenny Diski
ISBN-10: 1526621908
ISBN-13: 9781526621900
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: English
Published: 04/20/2021
Pages: 448
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.50w x 1.80d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/01/2021
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2021
Booklist 04/01/2021 pg. 16
Shelf Awareness 04/23/2021

About the Author

Jenny Diski was born in 1947 in London, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of ten novels, four books of travel and memoir, including Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in publications including the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, to which she contributed more than two hundred pieces over twenty-five years.

jennydiski.co.uk