Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Professor and Other Writings
    The Professor and Other Writings
    The Professor and Other Writings
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Professor and Other Writings

    Written by Terry Castle

    Narrated by Maggi-Meg Reed

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    “[Terry Castle is] the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” —Susan Sontag

    From one of America’s most brilliant critics and cultural commentators, Terry Castle, comes The Professor and Other Writings: a collection of startling, gorgeously-written autobiographical essays and a new, long-form piece about the devastation and beauty of early love. James Wolcott, contributing writer to Vanity Fair, calls Terry Castle a “Jedi knight of literary exploration and lesbian scholarship,” and The Professor and Other Writings “a greatest-hits package of show-stopping monologues and offhand-genius riffs.” The Professor and Other Writings is a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration of gender, identity, and sexuality in the grand tradition of such feminist luminaries as Susan Sontag, Camille Paglia, and Joan Didion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 19, 2010
    ISBN9780061991516
    Author

    Terry Castle

    Terry Castle was once described by Susan Sontag as ""the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today."" She is the author of seven books of criticism, including The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993) and Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women and Sex (2002). Her anthology, The Literature of Lesbianism, won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award in 2003. She lives in San Francisco and is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

    Related to The Professor and Other Writings

    Related audiobooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Burning House

      Jul 2, 2018

      The Burning House
      14 min read

    • Article

      Motherhood Makes You Obscene

      Oct 1, 2019

      Motherhood Makes You Obscene
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Future Is Coming, That’s a Fact: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Sarah Schulman in Conversation

      Jan 2, 2019

      What happened to the dream of the city as the place where you meet everyone you never imagined? Of queerness as ending borders rather than creating them. The post The Future Is Coming, That’s a Fact: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Sarah Schulman in

      8 min read

    • Article

      Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel

      Feb 1, 2019

      Shields has composed a portrait of the complicated author and the darknesses that drove Williams to write, to overcompensate, to philander, to mansplain. The post Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Elif Batuman on Fictionalizing Her Life, and Learning to Fact Check

      Mar 21, 2017

      In 2015, the New Yorker writer Elif Batuman was given a book contract to write an autobiographical novel about a Turkish-American journalist moving to Turkey to write for a New Yorker-like publication. Batuman herself had spent several years there wr

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Gina Apostol

      Dec 1, 2021

      When the pandemic began I worked fiercely on finishing a novel I had started but dropped a few years ago—because that’s what I do under stress: I buckle down and write. It’s how I cope. The post A Year in Reading: Gina Apostol appeared first on The M

      4 min read

    • Article

      Please Fire Jia Tolentino

      Aug 7, 2019

      Please Fire Jia Tolentino
      11 min read

    • Article

      Eula Biss's New Book 'Having And Being Had' Is About Buying A House In Illinois — And The Boxfuls Of Guilt And Self-questioning She Unpacked Next

      Sep 9, 2020

      CHICAGO - Let's be clear: To read Eula Biss is to remind yourself that you are relatively illiterate, have never had a clear thought in your life, can't compose a decent sentence if you tried and should probably just shut up and go into marketing alr

      8 min read

    • Article

      Ocean Vuong: ‘I Don’t Believe A Writer Should Just Keep Writing As Long As They’re Alive’

      Jun 3, 2023

      Ocean Vuong, 34, is an American poet and novelist born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. His 2016 debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, won the TS Eliot prize and Forward prize in 2017. His debut novel,

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos

      Dec 8, 2020

      I felt so wrecked, so torn apart—yet somehow, miraculously, also shored back up. The post A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson

      Dec 2, 2022

      Chantal V. Johnson reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘My “Sad Girl” Fans Concern Me’: Ottessa Moshfegh In Conversation With Carmen Maria Machado

      Jul 2, 2022

      At 41, Ottessa Moshfegh has appeared on the Booker prize shortlist, for her debut novel Eileen, and the bestseller lists, with My Year of Rest and Relaxation, for which she is currently collaborating on a film adaptation. Her new novel, Lapvona, is s

      8 min read

    • Article

      Interlude

      Mar 28, 2022

      Interlude
      10 min read

    Reviews for The Professor and Other Writings

    3.5/5

    28 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      Have you ever started to read a book and realized that it brought you a bit out of your comfort zone and frankly, was a bit over your head? This was one of those for me. I stuck with it though and it provoked many thoughts, feelings, and useful tidbits.

      Terry Castle was once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today." She is the author of seven books of criticism, including The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993) and Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women and Sex (2002). Her anthology, The Literature of Lesbianism, won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award in 2003. She lives in San Francisco and is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

      The Professor and Other Writings is a collection of autobiographical essays that while I found often entertaining, came off at times as incredibly pretentious to me. I get that she is a well-known literary critic, but her constantly using French words and her naivety at the times she is writing about, hardly made me want to respect her. Or even like her for that matter.

      I mentioned the nuggets of wisdom & entertainment….

      “I’ve come to believe more and more about both writing and music making: that in order to succeed at either you have to stop trying to disguise who you are. The veils and pretenses of everyday life won’t work; a certain minimum truth-to-self is required. “ (in the essay, My Heroin Christmas)

      Simply said, be who you are or you are going to fail. A lot of us, even in blogland, try to emulate other successful people as opposed to being ourselves. It is tough work and you can’t keep it up.

      The essay, Home Alone, was a hilarious introspective on why we are all obsessed with shelter magazines. Castle refers to is as “house porn” and it kind of is.

      I wouldn’t recommend The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle unless you are way more cultured and cooler than I am.
    • 5/5
      Castle's essays are extraordinary -- rollicking, erudite, hilarious, captivating.
    • 4/5
      The Professor consists of seven essay/memoir pieces, the longest and last about Castle's sexual relationship as a grad student with a woman professor. It's a profoundly disturbing relationship and Cast le spares neither the professor nor herself in the telling of it. Castle is neurotic, needy, desperate, the professor cruel, disassociative, manipulative. I didn't like the way Castle wrote about lesbians of the seventies, with a limited, dismissive view. Another piece is called "Desperately Seeking Susan," and is about herself and Susan Sontag. She possibly nails Sontag in some ways, but still there is an aura of snarkiness about the writing. The fact that Castle acknowledges her own failings, including a tendency to nastiness, doesn't alleviate the sense of mean-spiritness that seeps in.