Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in this “profound” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) new essay collection from Siri Hustvedt, an exploration of the shifting borders that define human experience, including boundaries we usually take for granted—between ourselves and others, nature and nurture, viewer and artwork—which turn out to be far less stable than we imagine.
Described as “a 21st-century Virginia Woolf” in the Literary Review (UK), Man Booker longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath’s journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art.
This moving, fierce, and often funny book is finally about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.

- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Previous Publications, Lectures, and Sundry Origins
- 1. Tillie
- 2. My Mother’s Ocean and How It Became Mine
- 3. Stones and Ashes
- 4. A Walk with My Mother
- 5. States of Mind
- 6. Mentor Ghosts
- 7. Open Borders: Tales from the Life of an Intellectual Vagabond
- 8. Notes from New York
- 9. Reading During the Plague
- 10. When I Met You I Saw Myself as Another
- 11. The Future of Literature
- 12. Translation Stories
- 13. The Sinbad Variations: An Essay on Style
- 14. He Dropped His Pen
- 15. The Enigma of Reading
- 16. Living Thing
- 17. Visiting St. Francis
- 18. Both-And
- 19. What Does a Man Want?
- 20. Scapegoat
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright
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Yes, you can access Mothers, Fathers, and Others by Siri Hustvedt in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Feminism & Feminist Theory. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.