Works
Her poetry and short stories were well received, but she came into her own with her novels. Her first, Snake was described variously as "lethal and fast-moving" (Publishers Weekly), "a narrative of pure anguish" (Times Literary Supplement), and "possessing a holographic shimmer" (New York Times Book Review). It was reported to have just missed the Booker Prize shortlist. Moral Hazard has been called "humane and unsparing; witty, unsettling, and wildly intelligent" by Shirley Hazzard, author of The Transit of Venus.
Jennings was awarded the Christina Stead Prize for fiction for Moral Hazard, which was also shortlisted for the 2003 Miles Franklin Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and the Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. Snake was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was Moral Hazard.
Both books contain strong autobiographical elements, Snake being about a girl growing up on a Riverina farm in the 1950s, and Moral Hazard about a couple facing Alzheimer's in the husband while the wife works as a speechwriter on Wall Street.
In 2008, she published Stanley and Sophie, a memoir ostensibly about her dogs but also about life in New York City after 9/11, politics in the U.S. and her encounters with two macaques in Bali at the time of the 2005 bombing there.
In March 2010, she published "Trouble", an autobiographical collection of her best work from the last four decades, covering topics from politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life.
Jennings is also known for writing outspoken essays and op-eds on the state of fiction, the direction of feminism, malfeasance in the financial industry, and the abuse of language in the business world. Andrew Field, a prominent Nabokov scholar, describes Jennings as a "ferocious truth-teller, He also cites her "humor, her obdurate individuality, and her willingness to say what other people won't."
Read more about this topic: Kate Jennings
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)