Jenny Diski

This is the first book-length study of Jenny Diski’s work, offering a bold and original account of a writer whose fiction and non-fiction together form a sustained project. Ben Grant approaches Diski’s work thematically, examining recurring concerns in her writing on self-portraiture, sex, illness, Jewishness, travel and animals. The book demonstrates how Diski consistently reworks the genres she writes within, including the novel of ideas, memoir and travel writing, and establishes her as a major contemporary author whose thinking takes place as much in narrative form as in argument. Combining close readings with archival research, this study reveals a writer who is both singular and finely attuned to her historical moment.