'How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?' The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master 'whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness' and 'thin, plain, tense, sour' Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'.

This is a disturbing and arresting tale that provokes all sorts of questions on the morality of journalism, a very thought provoking book with a very contemporary argument at its centre.

'How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?' The author asks at the beginning of this work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master and Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'.

Over the course of three summers in New England, Malcolm gathered leaves of the burdock plant, a large rank weed with medicinal properties that grows along roadsides and in waste places and around derelict buildings . This book reminds readers that writers like Chekhov and Hawthorne have used burdock to denote ruin and desolation .

The process known as psychoanalysis is sometimes revered, sometimes derided, and most often misunderstood. What good does it do? Can it help anyone? What risks does it pose to both patient and analyst? These questions are not easily answered, but this work reveals their complexity.

Janet Malcolm received a letter from a stranger, a lawyer named Sheila McGough, who wrote that she been convicted of crimes she had not committed. Malcolm decided to look into her alleged crime. Out of her investigations and narration emerges a portrait of American cupidity and American law, and of a woman too innocent to survive among either.

A brilliant, elegantly reasoned meditation on the nature of biography. Examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath.

Janet Malcolm's investigation into the personalities who clash over Freud's legacy endeavours to untangle the causes of their rivalry and soured friendships, while the flaws and mysteries of Freud's early work tower in the background.

Questioning the morality of journalism, this book studies the case of Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision , the story of a doctor convicted of murdering his wife and two daughters. The author explores the inherent imbalance that lies between journalists and their subject.

41.95

In Reading Chekhov Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov's life and framed by an account of a recent journey she made to St Petersburg.