Sven Birkerts – författare

Co-authored by two esteemed writers, Writing Well, is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose. 

Other Walk is a series of autobiographical pieces by the master of reflection and slow timeThroughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country''s foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms. In this deeply appealing and engaging collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his own life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. We read how the writer witnesses his son''s frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from many years ago, how finding a cigarette lighter or a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him—old friends, remembered places—are excavated, their layers exposed. But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but deeply loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children''s independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature''s finest practioners.In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov''s Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf''s unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr''s The Liars'' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist''s essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural consequences of ongoing, all-permeating technological innovationIn 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art—the very cultural activities that make us human. After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via e-mail and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject, he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others—the distraction when reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of "hive" behaviors. "An unprecedented shift is underway," he argues, and "this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation." He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and he brilliantly describes the countering energy available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are not conducive to creativity. It is impossible to read Changing the Subject without coming away with a renewed sense of what is lost by our wholesale acceptance of digital innovation and what is regained when we immerse ourselves in a good book.

“Birkerts reads Nabokov even as he allows Nabokov to read him. This is reading as high art, exhilarating and wise.”—CHRISTOPHER BENFEY,author, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay

“Much more than an exercise in literary criticism, this short book increasingly reads as a profound, sensitive, insightful meditation on family, history, time, language, the nature of artistic inspiration, and, in the end, even the meaning of life.”—OLGA GRUSHIN, author, TheDream Life of Sukhanov and Forty Rooms

“Like Nabokov’s, Birkerts’ book is both a nuanced excursion into the nature of memory and a reminder that reading and writing are acts of noticing. This is a supremely alert book about a supremely alert book.”—JOAN WICKERSHAM, author, The Suicide Index

Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is one of the most critically acclaimed memoirs of the twentieth century. In this classic account of his life, Nabokov writes about his idyllic Russian childhood in an aristocratic family, the Bolshevik revolution that led to his exile from Russia, and the path that would eventually lead him to live in America.

In the latest volume in Ig’s Bookmarked series, celebrated author and critic Sven Birkerts writes about how Speak, Memory not only intersects with various central life-concerns (exile, serendipity and coincidence, childhood, literary redemption), but is also vital to understanding the workings of memory in literature.