Trying to Be | A Collection

John Haskell

ISBN 10: 1573662143 / ISBN 13: 9781573662147

Published by University of Alabama Press, 2025

About this Item

Trying to Be | A Collection | John Haskell | Taschenbuch | Einband - flex.(Paperback) | Englisch | 2025 | University of Alabama Press | EAN 9781573662147 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Mare Nostrum Group B.V., Doelen 72, 4831 GR BREDA, NIEDERLANDE, gpsr[at]mare-nostrum[dot]co[dot]uk | Anbieter: preigu.

Seller Inventory # 134324740

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Trying to Be | A Collection
• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• 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
• Seller catalogs:
  • Bücher

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.