A feast of observations about everything from the particular beauty of lemons on a table, to the allure of Colette, to the streets of Paris, by the inimitable Deborah Levy.

“A dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more . . . Taken together, Levy’s extraordinary observations . . . amount to a trip through a consciousness trained to deeply consider everything it encounters . . . Readers will be grateful for this generous peek inside a singular mind.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things.

On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” On Elizabeth Hardwick: “She understands what is at stake in literature.” On the conclusion of a marriage: “It doesn’t take an alien to tell us that when love dies we have to find another way of being alive.”

Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations; each page is a beautiful, questioning composition of the self. The Position of Spoons is full of wisdom and astonishments and brings us into intimate conversation with one of our most insightful, intellectually curious writers.

“Writing with lyricism and wit always, Levy takes the reader on a journey through all that has mattered most to her writing and living, the things that make up her heart and mind’s tender fixations, and offers a way for us all to meditate on the small and crucial ways we make sense of the world.” —Julia Hass, Lit Hub

“Many of these disparate texts were originally published as commissioned introductions to novels or articles in journals, but together they acquire an electric energy as they begin to take the shape of an untethered, free-form autobiography . . . An elegant, minimalist collage.” —Kirkus Reviews

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Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and widely translated. The author of highly praised novels, including The Man Who Saw Everything (longlisted for the Booker Prize), Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl, the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka, and two parts of her working autobiography, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, she lives in London. Levy is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.  

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and part-time faculty at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Peninusula Press, UK; Catapult, US), as well as, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Vintage Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, as well as many psychoanalytic publications.

 

 

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