Books by Janet Malcolm

In 1970 Jeffrey MacDonald was accused of murdering his pregnant wife, and the journalist Joe McGinniss decided to write a book about it. Malcolm's celebrated book sheds a fascinating light on the conflict and controversy that followed, and asks whether all journalists are, ultimately, immoral.

Re-issue of Malcolm's revelatory biography of the tumultous union of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and the critical battle that dogs their legacies.

A provocative collection of interviews with the sublimely talented author of The Journalist and the MurdererThe legendary journalist, Janet Malcolm, opened her most famous work The Journalist and the Murderer with the line: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."Ever since its publication in 1980, she only increased her reputation as a devastatingly sharp writer, whose eye for observation is matched only by her formal inventiveness and philosophical interrogations of the relationship between journalist and subject.Predictably, as an interview subject herself, she was an intimidating mark. In this collection, interviewers tangle with their own projections and identifications, while she often, gamely, plays along. Full of insights about her writing process, the craft of journalism, and her own analysis of her most famous works, this collection proves that Janet Malcolm is just as elusive and enlightening in conversation as she was on paper.

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.

A fascinating exploration of psychoanlysis, its patients, practitioners and critics, from one of America's most respected and most controversial journalists.

From the celebrated author of The Journalist and the Murderer and Reading Chekhov comes a brilliant, compelling collection of essays on art, artists and the troubled nature of biography

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.

"e;How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis? Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. 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 Steins needs throughout their forty-year expatriate marriage. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couples charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties, she writes.The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. Even the most hermetic of [Steins] writings are works of submerged autobiography, Malcolm writes. The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaningyou need a crowbar for thatbut will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion. Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein solves the koan of autobiography, or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of magisterial disorder, Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.Praise for the author:[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.David Lehman, Boston GlobeNot since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography.Christopher Benfey

Through an intensive study of 'Aaron Green,' a Freudian analyst in New York City, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm reveals the inner workings of psychoanalysis.