Author | Julie Hecht |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Fiction |
Published | September 2, 2003 |
Publisher | Random House |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print, e-book |
Pages | 240 pages |
ISBN | 1400061741 |
Preceded by | Was This Man a Genius? |
Followed by | Happy Trails to You: Stories |
The Unprofessionals, also stylized as The Unprofessionals: A Novel, is the debut novel of American author Julie Hecht. [1] The work was first published on September 2, 2003 through Random House and was reprinted in paperback in 2008 through Simon & Schuster. The book follows Isabelle, a freelance photographer first introduced in Hecht's 1997 short story collection Do the Windows Open? . [2]
Swiftly approaching her fiftieth year, Isabelle (who is never referred to by name in the novel) finds that she's becoming disconnected from the world around her and has increasing difficulty finding her purpose in life. Her only real outlet is her friendship with a young man she met years ago during a photoshoot with his father, a wealthy and powerful surgeon.
Critical reception for The Unprofessionals has been positive. [3] [4] Richard Eder of the New York Times praised the work, comparing Hecht's writing to that of J. D. Salinger and stating that it had "beautifully contoured reflections". [5] The Chicago Times also wrote a favorable review, writing that it was "a corrosive sendup of the way we live now, spun out by a modern loner who happens to be every bit as distressing as the benighted, T-shirt-wearing masses she rails against." [6]
Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films.
Isabelle Anne Madeleine Huppert is a French actress. Known for her portrayals of cold, austere women devoid of morality, she is considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation. With 16 nominations and two wins, Huppert is the most nominated actress at the César Awards. She is also the recipient of several accolades, including five Lumières Awards, a BAFTA Award, three European Film Awards, two Berlin International Film Festival, three Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival honors, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her second on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century.
Julie Burchill is an English writer. Beginning as a staff writer at the New Musical Express at the age of 17, she has since contributed to newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. Her writing, which was described by John Arlidge in The Observer in 2002 as "outrageously outspoken" and "usually offensive," has been the subject of legal action. Burchill is also a novelist, and her 2004 novel Sugar Rush was adapted for television.
Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
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Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than four million copies sold since its publication. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides' life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; unlike the protagonist, Eugenides is not intersex. The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.
The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly.
Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks's fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen's experience of the war.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is a teacher, author, poet, historian, and philosopher. She was an associate professor of history at Nassau Community College (1994–2007) and most recently taught at The New School in New York City.
Margaret Caroline Anderson was the American founder, editor and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review, which published a collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. The periodical is most noted for introducing many prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, in the United States and publishing the first thirteen chapters of James Joyce's then-unpublished novel Ulysses.
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