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    The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
    The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
    The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
    Ebook281 pages5 hours

    The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

    By Jessa Crispin

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she’s still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.
              
    The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
             
    Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 22, 2015
    ISBN9780226278599
    Author

    Jessa Crispin

    Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of Bookslut.com and Spoliamag.com. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Architect Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and other publications. Her first book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exile, Expats and Ex-Countries is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. She has lived in Ireland, Chicago, Texas, Kansas, and Germany. She currently lives nowhere in particular.

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    • 2/5
      More accurate title would be "The Dead Authors Project." Liked the author's brutal self-reflection, but some of her opinions about other women are damaging and problematic.
    • 5/5
      This conjures up exactly some of the weariness and ennui of being a solo traveller, but at the same time it made me want to pack my bags and explore the coastal Adriatic. Crispin filters literature and the lives of writers through the lenses of the European cities she finds herself and her physical and emotional baggage in, and it's a lovely combination.
    • 5/5
      Okay, let's come right out and say that there were a few parts where I had to mentally separate the author as the author from the author as my sister, to sort of ignore that this is my childhood she's alluding to here, my hometown, me. But those parts were mercifully small. (I will go back and process those parts later, though I'm not sure Jessa would want me to.)

      Anyway, biased or not, I thought it was marvelous. Especially the Berlin chapter, which (despite there being an actual introduction) introduces the theme, the concept, the purpose of the rest of the book. At a loss in Berlin, Jessa turns to her old friend William James, who also fled to Berlin for a good part of his life, also at a time when he was struggling to find a purpose, a calling, a standard for success. James, like all the dead ladies in this book, fled his home country, choosing a new land and new culture to call his own (to varying degrees of permanence). As Jessa travels from place to place, she communes with someone who has gone before her, someone who has also shucked off the standards, the expectations, the bindings of home, and built a new life of their own choosing some place new.

      As she does so, she draws lines, both obvious and unexpected, between her own struggles for meaning, the personal struggles of her dead ladies, and more universal struggles, like the artist vs. the censor, adult children struggling with the expectations of their parents, women choosing whether to exploit, struggle with, or subvert the roles made available to them in a patriarchal society.

      A marvelous book that should be more widely read.

    Book preview

    The Dead Ladies Project - Jessa Crispin

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