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The Position of Spoons

and other intimacies, a collection of essays from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author

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The Position of Spoons

By: Deborah Levy
Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer

In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her.

From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of the author’s own.

Each page draws upon Levy’s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing, as she seamlessly shifts between and meditates on questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is a beautiful, tender composition of the questioning self: a portrait of Deborah Levy’s writing life and intellectual vitality in all of its dimensions.

© Deborah Levy 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

 Art & Literature Authors Essays Gender Studies Literary History & Criticism Social Sciences

Critic reviews

A scorching, poignant collection of essays . . . Deborah Levy's new book shows why she's the patron saint of women's writing . . . This collection is the essence of Levy because it revolves around her various literary and artistic heroes – women, mainly – who provide succour for her writing soul . . . Levy touches on how each inspired her; many of Levy's readers, in turn, will be hoping for some of that same inspiration to rub off on them . . . A generous book with much to amuse, admire and often agonise over
[A] gifted and enlightening writer . . . 'Telegram to a Pylon Transmitting Electricity of Distances' is a montage of intimate and industrial images that tessellate beautifully. 'The Position of Spoons', an elegant, unnerving and perfectly paced little anecdote from the past, is strange and moving . . . Deborah Levy is invariably sharp and sprightly company
For all lovers of culture, and writers in particular, The Position of Spoons has many gems . . . You could lose an hour, an afternoon, in its considered prose: the distillation of decades of reading and writing, of Levy’s intellectual engagement with life on and off the page . . . A life spent in thrall to art
[Levy’s] writing is one radiant mise-en-scène after another . . . Dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll . . . Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling, and with such economy . . . Her words are lit from within
A dream read for writers, creative thinkers and Levy devotees . . . No one writes with such precision and intimacy, and this book truly gives a glimpse at the mechanisms behind her talents
Supremely intelligent, accomplished and utterly in control of her craft . . . With details as acute as pinpricks of light through a black curtain, Levy captures contemporary life
Under the blowtorch of Levy’s attention, domestic space and everything in it is transformed into something radically meaningful . . . This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial
An absorbing essay collection . . . Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”
Levy writes skilfully on the complex interplay of self-presentation and effacement that’s often demanded of female creativity
All stars
Most relevant
Sparked my curiosity for further reading and learning more times than I can count. Definitely recommend.

Interesting!

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the stories never really took off. The first few had wings but the rest seem to plummet

not a lot

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