Winner of the 2024 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
TRYING TO BE moves with lyrical precision and a wry, aching intimacy, embracing history, memory, and the unstable performance of identity. Haskell assembles a quiet manifesto for how to think, how to live, and how to feel ourselves in our bodies.
John Haskell—known for his genre-defying literary voice—moves through a series of intimate, sharply observed portraits: Francis Bacon and his doomed lover; Danny Kaye and his split personality; Sophia Loren; Diego Velázquez; Ulrike Meinhof; and Yvonne Rainer’s radical reinvention of what dance can be.