Still Pictures

"Superb . . . While [Malcolm's] writing in these passages remains restrained, as it always was, they bear an unwonted intensity of feeling, seemingly held just barely at bay . . . [Still Pictures] unavoidably calls to mind the enduring power of another ?migr?, the novelist W.G. Sebald, who made similar use of photographs . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of her long career." --Charles Finch, The New York Times Book Review

"[Still Pictures] may be the world's most elegant annotated photo album . . . Each sentence, in true Malcolm form, turns out masterful . . . The collage artist puts fragments next to each other to make meaning, or spark energy, and this is what Malcolm does in Still Pictures . . . She is writing about the difficulty we have evoking our former selves, the many ways in which they are strangers to us." --Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic

"Possessed of charm and delicacy." --Vivian Gornick, The Nation

"[Still Pictures] is a characteristically Malcolmian work, reflecting on and resisting the conventions of the form in which she writes . . . It is as though we are sitting next to her in her living room as she flips through a family album . . . Part of the pleasure of this memoir is simply in getting to know her a little bit more . . . The other part is in reading new sentences by Janet Malcolm. They land like the opening lines of classic novels--hard, shining, immovable truths." --Elizabeth Winkler, The Wall Street Journal

"[Still Pictures] gains from its oddly off-centered quality--cantilevered, perhaps, as so many of [Malcolm's] books are . . . A self emerges from this elegant though fragmentary volume." --Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books

"[An] evocative and distinctive final book--an unusually succinct and thought-provoking personal memoir that manages to capture so much of what made Janet Malcolm so unfailingly interesting." --Heller McAlpin, NPR

"[Still Pictures] is a testament to those attributes Malcolm most admired (and relied on her journalistic subjects to lack): dignity, discretion, craft, and control." --Sam Adler-Bell, The New Republic

"Wondrous, revealing, fascinating, and confounding glimpses of an extraordinary life." --Ann Levin, The Associated Press

"Malcolm was one of our greatest writers, which makes the lesson of Still Pictures only the more poignant. Her final volume proves that even the finest chroniclers can still be leveled by their own lives, and that the memories that make us human are the foggiest and most ephemeral." --Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

"[Malcolm's] crisply argued, surprising, and mind-altering books are electrifying. This posthumous, delectably personal volume is a gift to all who have been happily provoked by her cutting observations, refusal to play nice, and mordant wit and a boon for every reader in search of superbly precise memoiristic essays." --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"[An] evocative posthumous memoir . . . Witty ("I was infected early on with the virus of romance") and reflective ("The glitter of memory may be no less deceptive"), this is a monument to a master of her craft." --Publishers Weekly

"[Malcolm exposes] sharp observations rendered in the precise, stylish prose that earned her acclaim . . . A graceful meditation on memory." --Kirkus Reviews