# How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature - Hardcover

by **Josh Cohen** (Author)

**A brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature invites us to contemplate profound questions about the human experience by focusing on some of the best-known characters in literature--from how Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to Ruth's embodiment of adolescent rebellion in Kazuo Ishiguro's _Never Let Me Go._**

**"So beautiful ... a fantastic book." --Zadie Smith, best-selling author of _White Teeth_**

In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual professions, Josh Cohen explores a new way for us to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll's Alice and Harper Lee's Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education as depicted in _Jane Eyre_ and as seen through the eyes of Sandy Stranger in _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie._

He discusses the need for adolescent rebellion as embodied in John Grimes in James Baldwin's _Go Tell It on the Mountain_ and in Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro's _Never Let Me Go._ He makes clear what Goethe's Young Werther and Sally Rooney's Frances have--and don't have--in common as they experience first love; how _Middlemarch's_ Dorothea Brooke deals with the vicissitudes of marriage. Vis-a-vis old age and death, Cohen considers what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's _Gilead_ and from Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's _The Leopard._

**Featuring:  
**  
\- **Alice--Lewis Carroll, _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass_**  
\- **Scout Finch--Harper Lee, _To Kill a Mockingbird_**  
\- **Jane Eyre--Charlotte Brontë, _Jane Eyre_**  
\- **John Grimes--James Baldwin, _Go Tell It on the Mountain_**  
\- **Ruth--Kazuo Ishiguro, _Never Let Me Go_**  
\- **Vladimir Petrovitch--Ivan Turgenev, _First Love_**  
\- **Frances--Sally Rooney, _Conversations with Friends_**  
\- **Jay Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald, _The Great Gatsby_**  
\- **Esther Greenwood--Sylvia Plath, _The Bell Jar_**  
\- **Clarissa Dalloway--Virginia Woolf, _Mrs. Dalloway_**  
\- **And more!**

### Author Biography

**JOSH COHEN** is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of many books and articles on modern literature, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis, including _How to Read: Freud, The Private Life: Our Everyday Self in an Age of Intrusion,_ and _Not Working: Why We Have to Stop._ He lives in London.

**Number of Pages:** 384

**Dimensions:** 1.6 x 8.3 x 5.5 IN

**Publication Date:** October 26, 2021

## Details

- **Price:** 28.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 28.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature - Hardcover

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