Siri Hustvedt's novels are known for being as thought-provoking as they are emotionally involving. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, a dazzling collection of essays written with Siri Hustvedt's customary intelligence, wit and ability to convey complex ideas in a clear and lively way. The combination offers a profound and fascinating insight into ourselves as thinking, feeling beings. I suggest you take this book to your favourite corner, turn off the phone and allow yourself to be reminded of the pure pleasure of using your mind. * Clare Longrigg, Psychologies * exquisitely eloquent... You'll be by turns inspired, provoked, educated and enchanted. Her writing is scientifically precise and poetically elegant, and this intense compilation merits careful attention. It's a book you can return to time and time again. * Beatrice Hodgkin, Easy Living * Hustvedt's deep interest in art, psychology, and neuroscience shape her brilliantly insightful novels as well as her virtuoso essays... Mystery, fact, intelligence, and enchantment flourish here. * Booklist * Hustvedt addresses a broad public without dumbing down her material... At once stimulating and warm-hearted, with sentences of drop-dead beauty and acuity on nearly every page. * Nick Rennison, Sunday Times, Culture * Siri Hustvedt is best known as a novelist and her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist...there is something refreshingly straightforward about her style. It has the confidence born of complex but well digested thoughts and thus lacks the tendency to obfuscate that is the hallmark of the inferior thinker's style. * Salley Vikcers, Observer * richly intelligent insights on every page * George Pendle, Financial Times * Her erudition, the sharp clarity of her thinking, the variety of her sources and the supple ways in which she weaves them into personal narrative, coupled with her fearlessness in the face of those aspects of the human condition which are of necessity ambiguous, infuse her work with a rare kind of quiet intellectual confidence... I'll be returning to these essays. * Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph