Boston WBUR Radio's Jim Sullivan reviews the latest book and interviews Siri by phone. "It doesn’t take me long to realize I’m in a very meta situation: I am a man speaking on the phone with a woman who wrote a book called A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women."
A few of the 2016 year-end lists that recommend A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind.
"Siri Hustvedt's writing - she's the author of novels like What I Loved and The Blazing World - carries much intellectual heft, revealing a vast knowledge of literature, art, psychology, and philosophy."
"With a systematic investment in bridging the gap between science and the humanities, Hustvedt has produced a series of essays that explore the mysteries of our linguistic system and the structures that put power, gender, and sexuality in tension with one another."
"The great enemy of thought and creativity is the received idea," Siri Hustvedt writes, and woe to the lazy purveyor of unexamined "truths" who comes under her sharp scrutiny in this stimulating essay collection."
"Siri Hustvedt talks about the dialogue between the arts, sciences and the sexes."
"When we say we’re drawn in or absorbed by a work of art, what exactly do we mean? How does human perception work? It can be argued that art literally grabs us, tugs at us, takes us for a ride. When we stand before a Cézanne, the rhythms of its colors, lines and movement subtly massage our nervous system."
Vivian Gornick reviewing for the New York Times writes: "A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is a collection of essays that, taken as a whole, is meant to increase the common reader’s understanding of and interest in the rich brew of human endeavor to be found in science and the humanities when we try to see the accomplishments of the one through the lens of the other."
"What separates the sciences from the humanities? What unites them? And how can they each illuminate the nature of mind and self? These were some of the questions on Siri Hustvedt’s mind as she began her new book of essays, A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women.
An interview with Jennie Yabroff for the Signature website.
"Siri, the computer program that operates as an artificially intelligent personal assistant, appears to know the answers to everything. So seemingly, does the author Siri Hustvedt, or at least such is the impression given by her voluminous, humorous and wide-ranging new collection A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex and the Mind."
"The novelist’s smart essays on science and the arts bridge the gap between the disciplines, inviting us to look at the world anew."
PEN America is pleased to announce the longlists for the 2017 PEN America Literary Awards.
A short excerpt from the review by Elif Shafak of A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind for the British newspaper The Observer.
"Brilliant women finding ways around macho constructs in science and art—and turning them to their advantage—is also the topic of novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt's new essay collection."
