Coventry

Essays

By: Rachel Cusk

Narrated by: Antonia Beamish

From Rachel Cusk, her first collection of essays about motherhood, marriage, feminism, and art

Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the listener. 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 listening for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.

©2019 Rachel Cusk (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing

This review is biased

by how much I loved the Outline Trilogy.
So don’t listen to me. She can do no wrong

Thought provoking

Insightful thorough literary commentary and essays that are very penetrating and honest. I thought this would be too fry at first but it really sucked me in and got me interested in reading the books she mentioned