Cleopatra's Noseis an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's celebrated writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"--from haute couture to literature to commanding empires. The subjects are iconic (Jackie, the Brontes, Toni Morrison, Anne Frank) and multifarious (tofu and performance art, pornography and platform shoes, kimonos and bulimia); all inspire dazzling displays of craft, wit, penetration, and intelligence. Here we find explorations of voracity: hunger for sex, food, experience, and transcendence; see how writers from Flaubert to Nadine Gordimer have engaged with history; meet eminent Victorians and the greats of fashion. Whether reporting on hairstyles, strolling the halls of power, or deftly unpacking novels and their writers, Thurman never fails to provoke, inspire, captivate, and enlighten.Cleopatra's Noseis an embarrassment of riches from one of our great literary journalists. Judith Thurmanis the author ofIsak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, winner of the National Book Award, andSecrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. A staff writer atThe New Yorker, she lives in New York City. ANew York TimesNotable Book of the Year Cleopatra's Noseis an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's celebrated writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"--from haute couture to literature to commanding empires.
The subjects are iconic (Jackie, the Brontes, Toni Morrison, Anne Frank) and multifarious (tofu and performance art, pornography and propaganda, kimonos and bulimia); all inspire dazzling displays of craft, wit, penetration, and intelligence. Here we find explorations of voracity: for sex, food, experience, and transcendence; see how writers from Flaubert to Nadine Gordimer have engaged with history; meet eminent Victorians and the greats of fashion. Whether reporting on hairstyles, strolling the halls of power, or deftly unpacking novels and their writers, Thurman never fails to provoke, inspire, captivate, and enlighten.Cleopatra's Noseis an embarrassment of riches from one of our great literary journalists. "Judith Thurman, the award-winning biographer of the authors Isak Dinesen and Colette and a staff writer at theNew Yorkersince 1987, begins her latest book,Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, with a candid and, by today's standards, brow-raising anecdote about her first piece of published journalism . Thurman's research and maximalist prose resulted in pieces that might be described as snapshots, were it not for the fact that they're more like short Imax movies. In this mix of profiles, fashion writing, book reviews and the occasional plunge into an unlikely area such as tofu-making, Thurman's subject matter is broad and her intellectual range even more so. She has the biographer's knack for distilling large amounts of information into manageable bites and an uncanny talent for picking the most surprising and salient details that speak volumes in only a few sentences.
To read Thurman on Anne Frank, Chanel and French critic and sex memoirist Catherine Millet, to name a few, is to feel that there is no need to read anything further on the subject."--Meghan Daum,Los Angeles Times "The essays collected inCleopatra's Nose, whose 39 subjects Thurman classifies as 'varieties of desire,' are their author's attempts, 'through a feat of style,' to 'prove my existence to intelligent skeptics, none more skeptic.