Coventry

NPR's Favorite Books of 2019

Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three "literary masterpieces" (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions.

Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta ("Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There's a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it's called being sent to Coventry"), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.

I: Coventry
Driving as Metaphor
Coventry
On Rudeness
Making Home
Lions on Leashes
Aftermath

II: A Tragic Pastime
Louise Bourgeois: Suites on Fabric
I Am Nothing, I Am Everything
Shakespeare's Sisters
How to Get There

III: Classics and Bestsellers
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow
On Françoise Sagan
Olivia Manning: The Balkan Trilogy
Eat, Pray, Love
Never Let Me Go
On Natalia Ginzburg