Trying to Be : A Collection

John Haskell

ISBN 10: 1573662143 / ISBN 13: 9781573662147

Published by University Of Alabama Press Okt 2025, 2025

About this Item

Neuware - The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves.

Seller Inventory # 9781573662147

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Trying to Be : A Collection
• Publisher: University Of Alabama Press Okt 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573662143
• ISBN 13: 9781573662147
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 216W x 140H x 7D millimeters 216 millimeters width by 140 millimeters height by 7 millimeters depth
• Weight: 154 grams

About this title

Synopsis

With lyrical precision and aching intimacy, Trying to Be moves through history, memory, and the performance of ephemeral identity, as John Haskell assembles a quiet manifesto for how to think, how to live, and how to feel ourselves in our bodies.

Trying to Be is a book about presence, absence, and the intricate art of inhabiting one’s own life. John Haskell—known for his genre-defying literary voice—moves through a series of intimate, sharply observed portraits: Francis Bacon and his doomed lover; Danny Kaye and his split personality; Sophia Loren; Diego Velázquez; Ulrike Meinhof; and Yvonne Rainer’s radical reinvention of what dance can be.

But this isn’t cultural commentary as ornament. These figures mirror Haskell’s own attempts to grapple with grief, estrangement, memory, and the failures of language. The result is a book that blurs the line between criticism and confession, art history and personal inventory. Whether recalling a botched friendship, a beloved mentor, or the carefully choreographed movement in a dance workshop, Haskell searches for new ways of becoming—through art, through awareness, through stories that have the quality of song. In prose that’s quiet but unflinching, Trying to Be asks: What do we do with our bodies, our memories, and our regrets when even language feels exhausted? And what happens when, against the odds, we keep going?

About the Author

John Haskell is author of I Am Not Jackson Pollock, American Purgatorio, Out of My Skin, and The Complete Ballet. He has written on art and dance, is a contributing editor at BOMB and A Public Space, is the recipient of NYFA grants and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature in Los Angeles, New York, and Leipzig.