NATIONAL BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist?

"A lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things" 

Vanity Fair

Monsters leaves us with Dederer s passionate commitment to the artists whose work most matters to her, and a framework to address these questions about the artists who matter most to us." 

The Washington Post

"[Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new." 

Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet


From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is part memoir, part treatise, and all treat (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer s instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?"

Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience's relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?

Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.

Part memoir, part treatise, and all treat . . . nimble, witty . . . Her exquisitely reasoned vindication of Lolita brought tears to my eyes . . . This is a book that looks boldly down the cliff of roiling waters below and jumps right in, splashes around playfully, isn t afraid to get wet. How refreshing. 

The New York Times

[Dederer] just keeps getting better and smarter. In Monsters, she ties herself in intellectual and emotional knots, poking holes in her own arguments with gusto. In contrast to so many nonfiction books adapted from articles, Monsters doesn t stretch a singular thesis over several hundred pages. Quite the contrary, it s absolutely exhilarating to read the work of someone so willing to crumple up her own argument like a piece of paper, throw it away and start anew. She s constantly challenging her own assumptions, more than willing to find flaws in her own thinking." 

The San Francisco Chronicle

Dederer s approach radiates humanity or, in other words, subjectivity . . . Throughout the book, Dederer mines the tension between how she thinks she should feel as a feminist, and how she actually feels as an artist; how she wants to feel as a mother, and how she truly experiences motherhood. She isn t afraid to get her hands dirty, approaching these issues with rigorous curiosity instead of intellectual authority and this willingness to challenge her own contradictory thought process is a welcome antidote to the dominant discourse surrounding the work of problematic figures, the societal mandates around which vacillate with the politics of the time." 

Document Journal
 

Ladenpreis Deutschland € 24,00

ISBN 9780525655114

Penguin

Sprache Englisch