A Plea for Eros

From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers.Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota cross-dressing or the novel Hustvedt''s nonfiction like her fiction defies easy categorization elegantly combining intellect emotion wit and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer''s mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self and how this has shaped her as a writer she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald Dickens and Henry James--with revelatory insight and a practitioner''s understanding of their art.