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

Named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of the Year ** Publishers Weekly’s Best Fiction Books of 2014 ** NPR Best Books of 2014 ** Kirkus Reviews Best Literary Fiction Books of 2014 ** Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Books of 2014 ** Boston Globe’s Best Fiction of 2014 ** The Telegraph’s Best Fiction to Read 2014 ** St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Best Books of 2014 ** The Independent Fiction Books of the Year 2014 ** One of Buzzfeed’s Best Books Written by Women in 2014 ** San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2014 ** A Nancy Pearl Pick ** PopMatters.com’s Best of 2014 Fiction

Winner of the 2014 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction

Finalist for the 2014 Kirkus Prize

Hailed by The Washington Post as “Siri Hustvedt’s best novel yet, an electrifying work,” The Blazing World is a masterful novel about perception, prejudice, desire, and one woman’s struggle to be seen.

In a new novel called “searingly fresh... A Nabokovian cat’s cradle” on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, the internationally bestselling author tells the provocative story of artist Harriet Burden, who, after years of having her work ignored, ignites an explosive scandal in New York’s art world when she recruits three young men to present her creations as their own. Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by the third man, Rune. Many critics side with him, and Burden and Rune 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. Writing in Slate, Katie Roiphe declared it “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.”

“Astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing” (NPR), Hustvedt’s new novel is “Blazing indeed:...with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity”(Kirkus Reviews, starred review). It is a masterpiece that will be remembered for years to come.

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