Overview

For thirty years Anne Enright—one of our greatest living novelists (Times)—has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: She interprets Sophocles’ Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights, and offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter. This stunning collection unites Enright’s cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time. True to the themes that saturate her award-winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, the subtleties of bodily autonomy, complex family dynamics, and the challenges of intimacy in crystalline, urgent prose. Here we see Enright grappling with and answering these questions in nonfiction. It is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

Full Product Details

9781324124139

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Reviews

""Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my copy of the book."" -- Maggie O’Farrell ""Anne Enright is a dazzling novelist . . . and an insightful essay writer. . . . Attention confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels."" -- Independent ""My feeling reading this collection is that each precious line needs going over twice. First for the sound and shape of the words, the second for their meaning. . . . [Enright] write[s] like a sharp, funny fallen angel and we will pay attention."" -- Guardian ""Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer."" -- Times ""One of the most gifted writers working in English today."" -- Jennifer Egan ""What a pleasure this book is. . . . I have admired Enright’s writing for a long time, but it struck me that she is one of the best essayists alive."" -- Megan Nolan, Observer

Author Information

Anne Enright is the author of eight novels, most recently The Wren, the Wren. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. In 2022, Enright was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives and works in Dublin.

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