Janet Malcolm (1934- 2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and Forty-One False Starts, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books
Even if you've been reading Janet Malcolm for years, the critical appreciations collected in Forty-One False Starts may surprise you. The title essay is (or pretends to be) a series of scrapped beginnings to her profile of the painter David Salle, a giant of the art world in vulnerable mid-career. If you want to write magazine prose, this alone should make you buy the book. Ranging from Bloomsbury to Edward Weston to J.D. Salinger, the entire book is full of stylistic daring, fine distinctions, and bold judgments set down at the speed of thought.--Lorin Stein The Paris Review online