Taking a Long Look

One of our most vital and incisive writers on literature, feminism, and knowing one's self.

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornicks essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience.

Drawing writing from the course of her career, All That is Given illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornicks work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world.

In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Toms Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the womens liberation movement of the 1970s. Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in All That Is Given demonstrate one of Americas most beloved critics at her best.