Taking a Long Look: Vivian Gornick with Margo Jefferson

The beloved critic discusses fifty years of essays on literature, feminism, and knowing one's self. 

Collected from across her expansive career, Taking a Long Look demonstrates Vivian Gornick's characteristic clarity and vibrance, exploring feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. The book covers the lives of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and it brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, that championed the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s.

Vivian Gornick speaks with Margo Jefferson about the collection and its glance back across a career that has made her one of America's most beloved critics. 

LIVE from NYPL is made possible by the support of Library patrons and friends, as well as by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
 Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and has been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Growing up in the Bronx amongst communists and socialists, Gornick became a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments (1987) and The Odd Woman and the City (2015) and the classic text on writing, The Situation and The Story.

 Margo Jefferson, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, was for years a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and The Guardian. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. Her book Negroland won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. 

GET THE BOOK
If you have a NYPL library card—or live in New York state and want to apply for one now—you can borrow Taking a Long Look for free with our e-reader app SimplyE. The title is available in accessible formats for community members who do not use standard print. Find out more at: nypl.org/talkingbooks. You can also request this book, and more, for pickup at one of our Grab & Go locations. 

Readers everywhere who wish to purchase copies of Taking a Long Look can do so at The New York Public Library Shop. Proceeds benefit the New York Public Library. 

ACCESSIBILITY NOTES
A live transcript will be provided.

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Vivian Gornick © Mitch Bach