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The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy
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The Position of Spoons

and other intimacies
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Narrator Alix Dunmore

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Length 3 hours 27 minutes
Language English
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Brought to you by Penguin.

From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer


In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her.

From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of the authorโ€™s own.

Each page draws upon Levyโ€™s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing, as she seamlessly shifts between and meditates on questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is a beautiful, tender composition of the questioning self: a portrait of Deborah Levyโ€™s writing life and intellectual vitality in all of its dimensions.

ยฉ Deborah Levy 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Reviews

A scorching, poignant collection of essays . . . Deborah Levy's new book shows why she's the patron saint of women's writing . . . This collection is the essence of Levy because it revolves around her various literary and artistic heroes โ€“ women, mainly โ€“ who provide succour for her writing soul . . . Levy touches on how each inspired her; many of Levy's readers, in turn, will be hoping for some of that same inspiration to rub off on them . . . A generous book with much to amuse, admire and often agonise over [A] gifted and enlightening writer . . . 'Telegram to a Pylon Transmitting Electricity of Distances' is a montage of intimate and industrial images that tessellate beautifully. 'The Position of Spoons', an elegant, unnerving and perfectly paced little anecdote from the past, is strange and moving . . . Deborah Levy is invariably sharp and sprightly company Under the blowtorch of Levyโ€™s attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful . . . This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial An absorbing essay collection . . . Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantelโ€™s advice to writers: to make the reader โ€œfeel acknowledged, and yet estrangedโ€ Levy writes skilfully on the complex interplay of self-presentation and effacement thatโ€™s often demanded of female creativity Expand reviews
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