Forty-one False Starts

'Janet Malcolm is one of our great non-fiction writers; her work shows that a magazine article, something we see every day, can rise to the highest levels of literature.' -- Ian Frazier * from the introduction *
'Malcolm's work inspires the best kind of disquiet in a reader-the obligation to think.' * Jeffrey Toobin *
'A legendary journalist.' -- Laura Miller
'No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm...Her -influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage.' * Paris Review *
'She is among the most intellectually provocative of authors, able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.' * Boston Globe *
'Forty-One False Starts is a remarkable and, in its strange way, gripping piece of work. It achieves the rare feat of communicating something valuable about the largely ineffable "creative process."' -- Zoe Heller * New York Review of Books *
'Janet Malcolm...remains a ruthless, dazzling journalist.' * Guardian *
'there's nothing like watching a master at work...Malcolm's trademark is the precision and elegance with which she identifies the heart of the matter in question'. * National *
'This is a well-laid challenge to readers to open their eyes to how they read, and how to judge.' * Independent *