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This book contains essays on painters, photographers, writer and critics. It brings together essays that were already published and reveals Malcolm’s obsession with artists and their works.  Summary of the Book Malcolm’s book of collected essays reveals her preoccupation with artists and their work. The subjects of her writing are painters, photographers, writers and critics. Some of the artists who have been spoken about in this book are Edith Wharton, Diane Arbus, and The Bloomsbury Group. She writes of how Bloomsbury has an obsessive desire to create things that are visual and literary. She has even written about the German art photographer, Thomas Struth. He is described as a man who is “haunted by the Nazi past”, but his photographs still appear to have “a lightness of spirit”. This beautiful collection of essays includes her iconic piece of writing about the painter David Salle. It is a great portrait of the artist as Malcolm has tried to capture the essence of David Salle in forty-one ways. About Janet Malcolm Janet Malcolm is an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and a collagist. She has authored: Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, In The Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer. She has resided in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939.