Non-Fiction Books
Deborah Levy’s witty take on the hysteria surrounding ‘Mad Cow Disease’ is both highly amusing and deeply disturbing. Written in the form of a diary of a steak in a butcher’s shop, the narrative charts a progression into madness. Using typographical errors, omissions and forays into other languages, Deborah Levy describes a “mind that has been symbolically culled”. Referencing Freud, psychoanalysis, Jean-Martin Charcot, the English pride in madness and the herd mentality, Diary of a Steak is both thought-provoking and poignant.
To be published simultaneously with Black Vodka , the Man Booker Prize–shortlisted writer's new collection of short stories, a shimmering jewel of a book about writing. Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay “Why I Write.” Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter-political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm-and Levy's newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective. As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK where she played at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye. Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the author at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the reader into a writer's heart.
The bestselling exploration of the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy. A New York Times Notable Book A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson. The Cost of Living , longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed novels.