"From one of our most elegantly controversial writers, here is a retrospective of essays, reviews, and profiles that reflects the range and depth of her engagement with psychoanalysis, criticism, art, and literature." "Janet Malcolm is perhaps best known for her writings on psychoanalysis, and here, in several essays, she addresses the subject with her usual erudition and lively skepticism, examining aspects of that "absurdist collaboration," the psychoanalytic dialogue, from which come "small, stray self-recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions . . . that no other human relationship could survive." In a selection of book reviews, Malcolm takes up such subjects as Tom Wolfe's vendetta against modern architecture, Milan Kundera's literary experiments, Vaclav Havel's prison letters, the art of autobiography, and a Victorian literary scandal. In the title essay, she expresses her conviction that the best criticism is "an exercise in excess and provocation," a process of "disfiguring the work of art almost beyond recognition" that allows us to see it in a radically new way." "In the final section, Malcolm gives us three extended portraits. She observes from behind "The One-Way Mirror" the work of Salvador Minuchin, pioneer and leading exponent of the inherently unorthodox practice of family therapy; she follows a former Czech dissident through the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague; and in "A Girl of the Zeitgeist," she brilliantly evokes the New York art world with her profile of a quintessential art insider, the engagingly grave Ingrid Sischy." "Each piece in this collection displays the incisive quizzicality and dazzling epigrammatic style that are the hallmarks of the writer whom Harold Bloom (speaking of Malcolm's In the Freud Archives) has called "the calmly rational Alice in this Wonderland.""--BOOK JACKET.