The Blazing World

A Novel

Siri Hustvedt

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781476747248
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476747255
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

“A spectacularly good read...feminism in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: richly complex, densely psychological, dazzlingly nuanced.” —Slate

From the internationally bestselling author of The Summer Without Men comes “an electrifying work” (The Washington Post) about the lengths one woman will go for artistic recognition amid the deceptive powers of prejudice, money, fame, and desire.

After years of having her work ignored or dismissed by critics, artist Harriet Burden decides to conduct an experiment: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.

Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by the third man, Rune, who claims the work as his own. After critics side with him, Burden and Rune suddenly find themselves in a charged and dangerous game—one that ends in his bizarre death.

An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle presented as a collection of texts, including Harriet’s journals assembled after her death, this “glorious mashup of storytelling and scholarship” (San Francisco Chronicle) unfolds from multiple perspectives as Harriet’s critics, fans, family, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of where the truth lies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Editor’s Introduction
• Harriet Burden: Notebook C (memoir fragment)
• Cynthia Clark (interview with former owner of the Clark Gallery, NYC, April 6, 2009)
• Maisie Lord (edited transcript)
• Harriet Burden: Notebook C
• Oswald Case (written statement)
• Rachel Briefman (written statement)
• A Compendium of Thirteen: Characters, a Non Sequitur, a Confession, a Riddle, and Memories for H.B.
• Harriet Burden: Notebook A
• Rosemary Lerner (written statement)
• Bruno Kleinfeld (written statement)
• Maisie Lord (edited transcript)
• Sweet Autumn Pinkney (edited transcript)
• Anton Tish (interview from Tutti Fruity, “Just Checking In,” April 24, 1999)
• Rachel Briefman (written statement)
• Phineas Q. Eldridge (written statement)
• An Alphabet Toward Several Meanings of Art and Generation
• Harriet Burden: Notebook B
• Bruno Kleinfeld (written statement)
• Oswald Case (written statement)
• The Barometer (excerpt from Phineas Q. Eldridge’s taped conversation, October 15, 2001)
• Maisie Lord (edited transcript)
• Patrick Donan (review of The Suffocation Rooms, Art Beats, NYC, March 27, 2002)
• Zachary Dortmund (review of The Suffocation Rooms, Art Assembly, March 30, 2001)
• Harriet Burden: Notebook K
• Harriet Burden: Notebook A
• Harriet Burden: Notebook M
• Harriet Burden: Notebook T
• Harriet Burden: Notebook O. The Fifth Circle (discovered by Maisie Lord, June 20, 2012)
• Rachel Briefman (written statement)
• Phineas Q. Eldridge (written statement)
• Richard Brickman (letter to the editor in The Open Eye: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art and Perception Studies, Fall 2003)
• William Burridge (interview, December 5, 2010)
• A Dispatch from Elsewhere: Ethan Lord
• Harriet Burden: Notebook D
• Harriet Burden: Notebook O
• Maisie Lord (edited transcript, June 13, 2012)
• Bruno Kleinfeld (written statement)
• Timothy Hardwick (“Rune’s Ego Machine: Harbinger of the New Aesthetics” in Visibility: A Magazine of the Arts, February 2009)
• Kirsten Larsen Smith (interview, November 2011)
• Harriet Burden: Notebook U
• Harriet Burden: Notebook O
• Harriet Burden: Notebook D
• Harriet Burden: Notebook T
• Sweet Autumn Pinkney (edited transcript)
• About the Author
• Copyright