A Small Personal Voice - Hardcover

Lessing, Doris May

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039449329X ISBN 13: 9780394493299

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1974

Synopsis

Collected works spanning a period of seventeen years reveal the contemporary writer's thoughts on her craft, various writers, her life, and Africa

About this title

From the Back Cover

'A Small Personal Voice' is an essential and definitive collection of Doris Lessing's finest essays, reviews, reminiscences and interviews from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Displaying to the full the extraordinary range of her intellectual curiosity, this volume includes tributes to fellow writers such as Isak Dinesen, Olive Schreiner and Kurt Vonnegut, essays on Malcolm X and Sufism, discussions of the responsibility of the artist, reflections on her political exile from Southern Rhodesia, and a recent, remarkable memoir of her combative and complicated relationship with her mother. Witty, acute, illuminated throughout by Doris Lessing's distinctive passionate honesty, 'A Small Personal Voice' is a fascinating self-portrait of one of this century's most provocative and influential writers.

'The Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child, London Observed, African Laughter' and many other Doris Lessing books are available in Flamingo.

'In an essay to accompany a reprint of Olive Shreiner's 'Story of an African Farm', Doris Lessing takes Schreiner's strange and beloved book and simply in telling its story reveals its inner logic just the way she does the lives of her most densely imagined characters. 'My father' is quite simple, loving, cleansing. She lights up this sketch with forgiveness and wonder, and does it with those firm-treading steps of hers that keep saying: this is how it was, had to be. There's no one like her.'
ROGER SALE, 'New York Times'

'It is Doris Lessing's peculiar gift to write with the kind of honesty and generosity that suggests to the reader he is privileged to be a friend, to feel he knows something of the true ideals, the private agonies and delights that have inspired her writing.'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

About the Author

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1974
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039449329X
• ISBN 13: 9780394493299
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 171