Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life--a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be.

Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own.

Still Pictures begins with the image of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague for New York at the age of five in 1939. From her fitful early loves, to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama.

Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like few others in our literature.

Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 01/10/2023
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 8.47h x 5.62w x 0.79d
ISBN: 9780374605131


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2022 pg. 18
Publishers Weekly 10/24/2022
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2022
Booklist 12/01/2022 pg. 102
Shelf Awareness 01/27/2023

About the Author
Malcolm, Janet: - Janet Malcolm (1934- 2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and Forty-One False Starts, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.Frazier, Ian: - Ian Frazier is the author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father and Coyote V. Acme, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He graduated from Harvard University. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.