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What I Don't Know About AnimalsWhat does Jenny Diski know about animals? She's really not sure. There is, however, one thing of which she is certain: our relationships with and attitudes to animals are worth thinking about. In What I Don't Know About Animals, she shows why. She sets out to investigate what she does and doesn't know about animals. She remembers the stuffed cuddly creatures from her childhood; the animal books she read; the cartoons she watched; the strays she found; the animals who have lived and still live with her; the animals she has observed close up, and those she has feared. She examines human beings, too, and the way in which they have looked at, studied, treated and written about the non-human creatures with whom we share the planet. Subtle, intelligent and brilliantly observed, What I Don't Know About Animals is an engaging look at what it means to be human and what it means to be animal.
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The SixtiesThis is Jenny Diski at her essayistic best in a highly personal and entertaining exploration of the twentieth century’s most colourful decade. Many books have been written on the Sixties: tributes to music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. In The Sixties, Jenny Diski breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big ideas that dominated the era – liberation, permissiveness and self-invention – to consider what she and her generation were really up to. Was it rude to refuse to have sex with someone? Did they take drugs to get by, or to see the world differently? How responsible were they for the self-interest and greed of the Eighties? With characteristic wit and verve, Diski takes an incisive look at the radical beliefs to which her generation subscribed, little realising they were often old ideas dressed up in new forms, sometimes patterned by BIBA. She considers whether she and her peers were as serious as they thought about changing the world, if the radical sixties were funded by the baby-boomers' parents, and if the big idea shaping the Sixties was that it really felt as if it meant something to be young. Click on any of the links below to view some online reviews:
Paperback available in July |
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On Trying to Keep Still(Little, Brown April 2006)Jenny Diski's two most recent works of nonfiction, SKATING TO ANTARCTICA and STRANGER ON A TRAIN, described what were as much inner as outer journeys, journeys of the mind. In these books, she confessed that she is never so happy as when she is at home, and that her urge to travel is a contrary one, something she is not sure that she herself understands. In ON TRYING TO KEEP STILL, she explores her own contrariness in new and challenging ways. Inspired by Michel de Montaigne, who retired to a tower in southern France in middle life and hardly ever left it, writing timeless essays which have since become famous, Jenny sets out to record her own state of mind in places as varied as New Zealand, deepest Somerset and inside the Arctic Circle. On Trying to Keep Still was published in April, 2006 by LittleBrown. |
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Stranger on a Train(Virago, 2002) In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay home with the phone off
the hook, Jenny Diski takes a trip around the perimeter of the USA by train.
Somewhat reluctantly, she meets all kinds of characters, all bursting with stories
to tell, and finds herself brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape
of America, half-known already through film and television. Like the pulse of
the train over the rails, the theme of the dying pleasures of smoking thrums
through the book, along with reflections on the condition of solitude and the
nature of friendship and memories triggered by her past times in psychiatric
hospitals. Cutting between her troubled teenaged years and contemporary America, the journey
becomes a study of strangers, strangeness and estrangement – from oneself,
as well as from the world.
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Skating to Antarctica(Virago 1997)'This strange and brilliant book recounts Jenny Diski's journey to Antarctica last year, intercut with another journey into her own heart and soul… a book of dazzling variety, which weaves disquisitions on indolence, truth, inconsistency, ambiguousness, the elephant seal, Shackleton, boredom and over and over again memory, into a sparse narrative, caustic observation and vivid description of the natural world. While Diski's writing is laconic, her images are haunting.' Elspeth Barker, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY |
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Don't(Granta 1998)'Literate, witty, sad essays...Diski's
experience of being female, Jewish and depressed and her
habitually sceptical,
helplessly
humorous tone make for stimulating reading.' |
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A View From the Bed(Virago 2003)This is a collection of wonderfully animated essays. In her inimitable style, with sharp wit and idiosyncratic views, Diski meditates on her own experiences, an array of key historical figures and contemporary topics including her ponderings on the thrill of guilt and the biblical role of water in ‘Did Jesus walk on water because he couldn’t swim?’, this is vintage Diski. ‘Grouped thematically under titles
like “Awkward Dames” and “Sex…” there’s
a good mix of longer pieces drawn from the London Review
of Books and shorter
journalism like “…And Shopping”, a year’s worth of columns
for the Sunday Times describing her thoughts as a con-sumer. It’s a delight
to read someone discussing subjects like this so engagingly without once de-generating
into either academic hieroglyphics or the inanity of lifestyle journalism.’ |
