Description: "Diski is one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature; she has made a habit, and a career, of writing books that no one else would even think of writing ... What binds together the disparate elements of her genre-confounding work-- part memoir, part travelogue, part criticism, part rant -- is the force of Diski''s peculiar personality . . . A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation, Diski''s cancer essays are bracingly devoid of sententiousness, sentimentality or any kind of spiritual urge or twitch . . . They also testify to an inner life of undiminished hyperactivity." - Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine "Nothing she writes ever sounds like it could have been written by someone else . . . [And] the essay form - part digressive memoir, part journey of exacting critical discovery - has always seemed her natural home . . . She has an uncanny ability to connect wildly disparate ideas and make them spark, to take readers on vivid mystery tours along her own neurological pathways, authorial umbrella held aloft. Her essays are often survival stories. And Diski has survived a great deal." - Tim Adams, The Guardian "The force of Jenny Diski''s personality, and the penetration of her mind, are as vivid as anything in contemporary journalism . . . She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or an irrelevant tosh like that, bur for writing so well." - Andrew Brown, The Guardian "Both heavy and light, Diski''s beautifully written memoir is worth any reader''s time." - Publishers Weekly "Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable." - Kirkus Reviews "This is an unsentimental portrait of living with illness and facing death, from one of the fiercest and most uncompromising writers of her generation." - Booklist "I need a replacement word for fierce. I need something slightly less bloodying than savage and something more devastating than captious. I need a word for Jenny Diski''s undiminished prose in this, her final book, In Gratitude , which is being released in the U.S. just weeks after her death on April 28, 2016, nearly two years after she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. I need the right word. Don''t have it." - Beth Kephart, New York Journal of Books "While I couldn''t read ''In Gratitude'' without a persistent lump in my throat, and without the persistent awareness that its author was in a bed, somewhere, experiencing the very last days or hours or minutes of her life, Diski''s final book proves transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." - Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book Review "[A] searing, no-prisoner''s-taken memoir." - Martin Rubin, Washington Times "In her final memoir before her death, Diski, who was quasi-adopted by Doris Lessing, examines the origin, and the close, of her life as a writer." - New York Times Book Review , Editor''s Choice "Diski''s North London truancy in the early 1960s, her initiation into writing through Lessing''s example, and her dry thoughts about her coming end (who would die first, her or Clive James)--these elements make for the final masterpiece of a writer whose prose always delivered the force of her personality." - Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine, Vulture blog "Everyone who reads this book will wish she were still around to sit back and half-smile at our discomfort." - Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly "For me, the most essential aspect of In Gratitude is that Diski never once averts her gaze . . . This is a story about death we want to hear: how it was reckoned with, or even overcome. This is a story about death that doesn''t end in disappearance, that pulls out some sort of grace or perseverance at the close. This is a story about death that is really about resilience, which is another way of saying loss or grief and how we handle them." - David Ulin, LitHub "Nobody had a voice quite like Diski''s . . . Through it all, you have the sense of Diski turning her life over and over in her lively mind, writing it all down to figure out what she thinks." - Tom Beer, Newsday "With "In Gratitude," she has written a different kind of cancer memoir, and an almost entirely platitude-free one, simply by writing a typically sui-generis Jenny Diski book. Which is to say, a book that pushes in five or six directions at once." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times, Books of the Times

Please Wait