Crossing Ocean Parkway

Crossing Ocean Parkway

University of Chicago Press

  • Winner, American Book Award

I wrote this book after a shocking racial murder in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where I grew up. Part memoir and part social criticism, Crossing Ocean Parkway is about moving into some version of upper-class American life that turns out to be different than you thought, and the difficulty of coming home.

Brave, enlightening, compassionate, and beautifully written.Joyce Carol Oates
Like Walt Whitman, Torgovnick has found that the crossing between Brooklyn and the world beyond eternally recurs, fraught with moments of pain, awkwardness and, sometimes, grace.Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
Torgovnick’s discussions of class and ethnicity are fascinating.Los Angeles Reader
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Gone Primitive

Gone Primitive

Savage Intellects, Modern Lives · University of Chicago Press

  • A New York Times Notable Paperback

A favorite, best-selling book, where I found my voice as a writer. If you admire African art or wear Indian jewelry, if you like Tarzan or have — or know someone who has — tattoos with Oceanic or Native American motifs, you’ll adore Gone Primitive, a lively romp through our fascination with “exotic” cultures.

A superb book — a gift to its own culture.The New York Times
Torgovnick writes with verve, lucidity, and intelligence about a complex array of issues. She manages sensitivity without moralism, depth without obscurity.Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A fireworks of a book. Read and praise it.Catherine R. Stimpson
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The War Complex

The War Complex

World War II in Our Time · University of Chicago Press

  • Outstanding Academic Title, Choice
  • PROSE Book Award, Honorable Mention

When I was growing up, my family watched a lot of documentaries about World War II, and that fostered an abiding interest in films, novels, and non-fiction about that conflict and the ways it has influenced life up to today. When I wrote this book, I discovered lots of neglected histories hiding in plain sight that help explain the way we live now.

A beautifully written meditation on the horrifying and yet strangely narcotic spectacle of mass death.Stanley Fish
Through personal rumination and inventive analysis, Torgovnick offers an inspiring model for a new way to write cultural history. Her lucid, compassionate voice leads us through nightmare with exemplary generosity and intelligence.Wayne Koestenbaum
A provoking and ethical book that recovers forgotten history.James S. Young
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Crossing Back

Crossing Back

Books, Family, and Memory without Pain · Fordham University Press1

  • A sequel to the award-winning Crossing Ocean Parkway

When my mother died, closely followed by my only brother, I was in a tailspin: brittle, restless, and unable to write. Over time, I accessed the ability to think about those I had lost with equanimity — what I call “memory without pain.” I read classic books from The Odyssey onwards, wrote, meditated, and cultivated memory itself. Along the way, I learned some things about grief, and wanted to share.

Ornately detailing practices like reading and meditation as responses to personal bereavement, the memoir movingly demonstrates how to hang on and how to let go of the people and things we love.Sean Metzger
Rich in personal detail and expansive in its exploration of family relationships, an enduring marriage, and the deaths of a mother and brother, Crossing Back also includes delightful meditations on elephants and children’s books, food, yoga, and our fascination with empty cities.Janice Radway

Discussed on The Grief Code with Ian Hawkins, True Life with George Monty, All About Women with Kathryn Cox for Voice of America, and The Science of Psychotherapy with Richard Hill.

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The Novelist’s Wife

The Novelist’s Wife

Marianna Torgnick published as Sasha Bristol

  • A fictionalized look behind the scenes at a fascinating marriage

I started The Novelist’s Wife when some sentences kept composing themselves in my mind, most often, “He was a boy when I met him.” The lines belonged to Frieda von Richthofen Weekley Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence’s wife, who has been called “the woman of the future,” and hailed as “spontaneous, intense, full of bursting life — nothing down, all up!” Born a German aristocrat and married young to a dull older professor, Frieda eloped with Lawrence, who was her husband’s student, and lived a nomadic, vivid, exciting life in London, Cornwall, Italy, Australia, Mexico, and New Mexico.

Charting the complex terroir where independence and genius cross with love and desire, The Novelist’s Wife led me deftly into the heart of this extraordinary marriage.Michael Malone
A story of operatic proportions.Gene Scheer

Invited readings at the Colgate Writers Conference, the D. H. Lawrence Society in London, the North American D. H. Lawrence Society in Taos, and the University of New Mexico.

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Primitive Passions

Primitive Passions

Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy · Knopf and University of Chicago Press edition

After I wrote Gone Primitive, there was more to say about people who explore “the primitive” as a medium for self-exploration and personal fulfillment. Spending time with figures like Dian Fossey and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as practices like genital piercing, Primitive Passions links art, literature, psychology, and religion to deepen and enrich our understanding of the past and the present.

Intends to provoke thought, not to tell you what you already know — and for that reason alone it’s extraordinary.Walter Kendrick, The New York Times
A powerfully argued, impassioned, and intelligent exploration of the “primitive” in our culture and in ourselves.Joyce Carol Oates
A fascinating, wide-ranging and provocative tour of twentieth-century Western culture.Cynthia D. Schragen, The Women’s Review of Books
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Earlier…

When I began my career, my writing was accessible, but more academic. That said, people continue to read and cite these early books.

The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel

The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel

James, Lawrence, and Woolf · Princeton University Press

Nineteenth-century novels often provide illustrations to allow readers to see the action. Modernist novels found numerous and powerful ways not only to use paintings in their plots but also to evoke the novels’ themes and to generate characters through ways of seeing. In reviews, this book was called “likely to structure study and discussion” — and I liked that.

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Closure in the Novel

Closure in the Novel

Princeton University Press

As someone who has always been fascinated by how novels end — shockingly, I sometimes even read ahead — I wrote this book to study how famous novels end, often forcefully effacing conflicts in an after-history or epilogue. People find this book useful to understand how novels, as well as movies, end.

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