Constructing A Nervous System A Memoir Kindle Margo Jefferson by Margo Jefferson 9781524748180, 1524748188, 2021029571, 2021029572 instant download after payment.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic & memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others—her parents & maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, & stars. These are the figures who thrill & trouble her, & who have made up her sense of self as a person & as a writer. 

In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise & occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics.

Bing Crosby & Ike Turner are among the author’s alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate & instructive sounds of a parent’s voice. W. E. B. Du Bois & George Eliot meet illicitly. The muscles & movements of a ballerina are spliced with those of an Olympic runner, becoming a template for what a black female body can be.

The result is a wildly innovative work of depth & stirring beauty. It is defined by fractures & dissonance, longing & ecstasy, & a persistent searching. Jefferson interrogates her own self as well as the act of writing memoir, & probes the fissures at the center of American cultural life.

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The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, MARGO JEFFERSON was for years a theater & book critic for Newsweek & The NY Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, NY magazine, & The New Republic. She is the author of On Michael Jackson & Negroland: A Memoir & is a professor of writing at Columbia