The New Yorker staff writer and noted biographer Janet Malcolm’s latest work, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas has received early critical acclaim from the The New York Times ("Malcolm’s writing in Two Lives is brilliant, penetrating and playful. There is in her cleverest, most arcane intellectual analysis a grace, a lightness of touch, that one rarely finds in a work of scholarship… If Two Lives has a weakness, it is that one wishes, at the end, for more.") to BookLoons. The Yale Press Log has a full roundup of links, including excerpts and photos from the book.

Malcolm comes to the Y to kick off this season’s Biographers & Brunch Series with a discussion of the book on October 7. If you’re unacquainted with Malcolm’s place in the literary world, read Craig Seligman’s now 7-year-old lengthy dissection of her on Salon.com. It’s worth your time. Here are a few quotes she has made her indelible mark with:

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
The Journalist and the Murderer

“Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.”
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

“Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain for appearances, has chosen as her uniform...The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.”
The Crime of Sheila McGough

“The narrator of my nonfiction pieces is not the same person I am—she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say than I usually do.”
The Believer Interview, 2004

Related: Janet Malcolm’s recent review of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, co-written by New York Times op-ed page editor David Shipley who is coming to the Y on November 29 to share the secrets of writing opinion pieces that get published.