Author(s): Jenny Diski

Culture Ideas Politics

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE. The best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, an injection of grade-A intellectual adrenaline (Vulture), selected by the legendary editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.  Diski expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be - New Yorker.  Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as virtuoso performances, and small masterpieces.  From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is an interrogation of universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated - and mordantly funny.  With an afterword by her daughter, Chloe Diski, this is a must-have for essay lovers everywhere.