Synopsis
With lyrical precision and aching intimacy, Trying to Be moves through history, memory, and the performance of ephemeral identity, as John Haskell assembles a quiet manifesto for how to think, how to live, and how to feel ourselves in our bodies.
Trying to Be is a book about presence, absence, and the intricate art of inhabiting one’s own life. John Haskell—known for his genre-defying literary voice—moves through a series of intimate, sharply observed portraits: Francis Bacon and his doomed lover; Danny Kaye and his split personality; Sophia Loren; Diego Velázquez; Ulrike Meinhof; and Yvonne Rainer’s radical reinvention of what dance can be.
But this isn’t cultural commentary as ornament. These figures mirror Haskell’s own attempts to grapple with grief, estrangement, memory, and the failures of language. The result is a book that blurs the line between criticism and confession, art history and personal inventory. Whether recalling a botched friendship, a beloved mentor, or the carefully choreographed movement in a dance workshop, Haskell searches for new ways of becoming—through art, through awareness, through stories that have the quality of song. In prose that’s quiet but unflinching, Trying to Be asks: What do we do with our bodies, our memories, and our regrets when even language feels exhausted? And what happens when, against the odds, we keep going?
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About the Author
John Haskell' s books include I Am Not Jackson Pollock, American Purgatorio, Out of My Skin, and The Complete Ballet. He is a writer and contributing editor at BOMB and A Public Space. He is the recipient of NYFA grants and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He has taught writing and literature in Los Angeles, New York, and Leipzig.
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Paperback. Condition: New. The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves. Seller Inventory # LU-9781573662147
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves. In Trying to Be, John Haskell braids essay, fiction, memoir, and cultural history into a haunting meditation on loss, artistic legacy, and the unfinished project of the self. From dance studios to prison cells, from dying friends to dying fathers, Haskell maps the ways we inhabit--and resist--the roles we've been given. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781573662147
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Paperback. Condition: New. The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves. Seller Inventory # LU-9781573662147
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