Siri Hustvedt Books in Order

Impoverished graduate student Iris Vegan arrives in New York and becomes involved with people whose attention threatens her sense of identity. Strange work, an unsettling portrait, illness and a fraught relationship draw her into increasingly uncertain versions of herself.

Young waitress Lily Dahl stands on the edge of adulthood in a Minnesota town held together by gossip and secrets. Unexpected friendships, desire and disturbing incidents challenge her ability to distinguish familiar appearances from a stranger reality underneath.

Across six essays, Siri Hustvedt explores the relationship between art and lived experience. Personal memories, literature and close attention to painting become ways of asking how images and stories shape our understanding of other lives and our own.

An art historian's discovery of a painting begins a friendship between two New York families that lasts for decades. Their lives become closely intertwined, until tragedy and deception threaten the trust built through art, marriage and parenthood.

Siri Hustvedt brings personal recollection and literary criticism together in essays about identity, writing and cultural assumptions. Moving from her Minnesota childhood to authors including Dickens and Henry James, she considers the different selves that inhabit a writer's imagination.

Siri Hustvedt examines paintings by artists including Vermeer, Goya and Joan Mitchell through close observation and personal experience. These essays explore how sustained attention uncovers unexpected details and changes the relationship between a picture and its viewer.

After their father's death, Erik and Inga discover a note suggesting his involvement in a mysterious death. Their search through his past intersects with troubling secrets in their own lives, exposing the hidden burdens carried across generations.

After experiencing uncontrollable shaking while speaking at her father's memorial, Siri Hustvedt searches for an explanation. Her investigation moves through neurology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, raising questions about memory, identity and the relationship between mind and body.

When her husband requests a break from their marriage, poet Mia suffers a breakdown and returns to her childhood town. Her mother's friends, a troubled young neighbour and a group of adolescent students draw her into new perspectives on women's lives.

Thirty-two essays draw connections between Siri Hustvedt's life, visual art and research into the mind. Moving across philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and literature, she asks how memory, emotion and imagination shape the experience of being a person.

Ignored by the art establishment, Harriet Burden exhibits her work through three male collaborators to expose its prejudices. Her attempt to claim credit becomes a contested mystery, reconstructed through journals and conflicting accounts after a dangerous artistic partnership ends in death.

Siri Hustvedt explores art, gender and the mind through essays connecting the humanities with scientific research. She considers the biases shaping perception, competing accounts of consciousness and the difficulty of defining what makes us human.

Rediscovering notebooks from her first year in New York, an older novelist revisits her younger self's ambitions and fascination with an unsettling neighbor. The distance between memory and her written record reveals how experience changes the stories people tell about themselves.

Siri Hustvedt combines family memories with feminist inquiry to explore motherhood, artistic influence and the boundaries between people. Stories of her relatives lead into questions about prejudice, inherited authority and how relationships shape the self.

Following Paul Auster's death, Siri Hustvedt reflects on their forty-three years together and the disorientation of grief. Memories, journals and personal writings trace how love and a shared life persist through the daily experience of absence.