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"Each volume in the probing Graywolf Forum series explores a theme lush with psychological, cultural, social, and political complexities: memory, technology and art, sports, and now privacy. Poet and memoirist Peacock, a veteran when it comes to the risky work of exploring the line between the private and the public, has ensured scintillating coverage by assembling a group of writers not ordinarily encountered within the same covers. Poet Yusef Komunyakaa proves to be a form-pushing essayist as he considers everything from loud cellular phone conversations to the burglarizing of his apartment, a nude beach, and the peddling of private matters for public consumption for that much-touted 15 minutes of fame. Other freshly anointed privacy experts include Dorothy Allison, Vivian Gornick, Jonathan Franzen, F. Gonzalez-Crussi, and, surprise, Barbara Feldon, aka Agent 99. Peacock's worthy troupe of articulate contributors provocatively illuminate diverse aspects of our contradictory feelings about protecting and violating privacy."
Donna Seaman, Booklist© American Library Association, All rights reserved

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The Private I: Privacy in a Public World

a collection of essays
edited by Molly Peacock

The Graywolf Forum Series

How we find privacy and how we lose it is the scope of this lively and engaging collection of essays. Writers tackle the issue of privacy on many levels: global, communal, and the very personal. Subjects include a look at the implications of surveillance technology; an exploration of teen web sites and the lives of the girls who make them; and thoughts on the polarity of a warm, sometimes claustrophobic, Latin community vs. cold North American isolation. Authors include well-known writers and poets, plus attorneys, an actor, a physician, a psychologist, a man serving time in prison, a recent college graduate, and a scholar: Anita Allen, Dorothy Allison, Barbara Feldon, Jonathan Franzen, Bronwyn Garrity, F. Gonzalez-Crussi, Vivian Gornick, Michael Groden, Evans D. Hopkins, Wayne Koestenbaum, Yusef Komunyakaa, Wendy Lesser, Cathleen Medwick, Kathleen Norris, Josip Novakovich, Molly Peacock, Victoria Roberts, Janna Malamud Smith, and Robin West.

For an excerpt of this collection of essays, click here