The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Signed First Edition)

Vivian Gornick

ISBN 10: 0374298602 / ISBN 13: 9780374298609

Published by Farrar Straus Giroux, New York,, 2015

About this Item

FSG, New York, 2015. First edition. First printing. Very fine in a very fine dust jacket. A pristine unread copy (without marks or bruises or smells or any other defect). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket cover (not clipped, of course). Shipped in well-padded box. Purchased new and opened only for author to sign. SIGNED AND DATED BY AUTHOR on title page in the month of publication. You cannot find a better copy. Finalist, NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD for Autobiography, 2015.

Seller Inventory # 07-2015-572

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux, New York,
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374298602
• ISBN 13: 9780374298609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Memoir
  • Signed Memoirs
  • Signed First Editions

About this title

Synopsis

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiography

A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees.
Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

About the Author

Vivian Gornick's books include Approaching Eye Level, The End of The Novel of Love, and The Situation and The Story. She lives in New York City.