A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind - Paperback

by Siri Hustvedt (Author)

A compelling, radical, "richly explored" (The New York Times Book Review) and "insightful" (Vanity Fair) collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from prizewinning novelist Siri Hustvedt, acclaimed author of The Blazing World and What I Loved.

In this expansive volume, Hustvedt presents a trilogy of intellectually daring works that reveal the striking breadth of her knowledge across the humanities and sciences. Armed with passionate curiosity and multidimensional insight, she repeatedly challenges cultural assumptions and inherited ideas.

"A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women"--the title essay--explores not only specific artworks by Picasso, de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, and others, but also the very nature of human perception and the biases embedded in how we view art, literature, and each other.

In "The Delusions of Certainty," Hustvedt dissects the mind-body problem, revealing how neuroscience, AI, and evolutionary psychology often oversimplify the complexities of human consciousness. "What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition" delves into Kierkegaard, suicide, synesthesia, memory, hysteria, and the role of fiction in understanding identity.

Wide-ranging and deeply erudite, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is a vital meditation on thinking, knowing, and being--a landmark of interdisciplinary thought that cements Siri Hustvedt as one of the most perceptive voices of our time.

Author Biography

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, five collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. She is the recipient of many other awards, including the Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize, and the Sigourney Award for expanding psychoanalytic thought. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.