Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

Bringing together a quarter-century's worth of subtle, sharply observed essays on artists and writers, this collection chronicles not just life events and artistic influences, but also the amorphous subjectivity of biography itself . . . These unstinting essays investigate how a consensus forms relating to a body of work or an artistic movement, how attitudes toward art change over time, and how artistic legacies are managed--or mismanaged--by children and heirs.
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review and pick of the week)

No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm . . . Her -influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage.
--Katie Roiphe, The Paris Review

No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm . . . Her -influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage.
--Katie Roiphe, The Paris Review

[A] master of the profile...alluring, pointed, singularly perceptive tellings.
-- The New Yorker

Forty-One False Starts [is] a powerfully distinctive and very entertaining literary experience. . . what the reader remembers is Janet Malcolm: her cool intelligence, her psychoanalytic knack for noticing and her talent for withdrawing in order to let her subjects hang themselves with their own words. . .These short pieces [are] unmistakably the work of a master.
--Adam Kirsch, The New York Times

Forty-One False Starts is a remarkable and, in its strange way, gripping piece of work. It achieves the rare feat of communication something valuable about the largely ineffable 'creative process.'
--Zoe Heller, The New York Review of Books
[An] invigorating new collection . . . keenly intelligent journalism that feels, always, as if it had been written by a human being, one with a beating heart, a moral compass, a wide-ranging curiosity, and a point of view.
--Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe

Even if you've been reading Janet Malcolm for years, the critical appreciations collected in Forty-One False Starts may surprise you. The title essay is (or pretends to be) a series of scrapped beginnings to her profile of the painter David Salle, a giant of the art world in vulnerable mid-career. If you want to write magazine prose, this alone should make you buy the book. Ranging from Bloomsbury to Edward Weston to J.D. Salinger, the entire book is full of stylistic daring, fine distinctions, and bold judgments set down at the speed of thought.
--Lorin Stein, The Paris Review online