Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?

Essays

Jenny Diski

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury
03 November 2020

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Literary essays; Literature: history & criticism

Choose the pursuit of happiness if you really must, but there are better things to do with a life, unless freedom from difficulty is the only acceptable existence.

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own diagnosis with cancer. Her columns in the London Review of Books – selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, ranged from subjects as various as happiness, social psychology, self-absorption and cats – have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’, and ‘small masterpieces’.

Original, opinionated and well ahead of her time, this collection will allow readers old and new to ‘read Diski for the pleasures of Diski, but also read Diski to learn what we may think, in the future, about how, were we possessed by foresight, we might have better performed our humanity in the now’ (New Yorker)

By: Jenny Diski
Imprint: Bloomsbury
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm,
Weight: 582g
ISBN: 9781526621900
ISBN 10: 1526621908
Pages: 448
Publication Date: 03 November 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

Reviews for Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays

One of the most electrifying memoirists of her generation ... A superb volume of autobiographical fragments * Daily Telegraph * One of the most inventive writers of her generation * Independent * She is savagely good company * Daily Telegraph * Diski is one of the language's great, if under-appreciated, stylists * Guardian * The appeal of Diski's essays was the appeal of Diski herself ... brilliant, irritable, mordant, and humane * Paris Review * Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise -- Emilia Clarke