Forty One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Janet Malcolm, 2013

Where to start with this fascinating, engrossing, remarkable collection of writing by one of America’s pre-eminent essayist/journalists. Malcolm, now 80, has written for The New Yorker for decades and this collection includes paeons to William Shawn and Joseph Mitchell.   It also includes the eponymous essay about the artist David Salle, as well as essays about Virginia Woolf, the German photographer Thomas Struth, Edith Wharton, J.D. Salinger, Julia Margaret Cameron, Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, and the nude in art focusing on John Ruskin and Kenneth Clark and at great length, The Girl of the Zeitgeist which through its focus on Ingrid Sischy who became editor of Artforum at the age of 27 in 1979 describes in awesome detail and feeling the art world in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s. Great personalities in art, criticism, poetry, and fashion fill the page and you actually care about what they are saying and doing, all the time following Sischy’s sheparding of the magazine through the turbulent waters of popular and high cultural criticism. The writing is quite wonderful as are the topics in this outstanding collection of essays. Makes me want to read all of Malcolm.