A new collection of essays—on friendships long and short, on reading and learning, on the life of the mind and the life of the city—built from the experiences and wisdom of the inimitable Vivian Gornick.

In On Friendship: And Other Essays, Vivian Gornick, the beloved, celebrated critic and author of Fierce Attachments, returns with a new collection of essays. Here she writes of friendship—what we understand (and don't) about connection, ourselves, and each other. She writes of her time at the City College of New York, the great transformer of the city’s working class into an educated force: how it shaped her political and intellectual life and introduced her to the need for argument. And she writes, as ever, with depth and precision about reading, writing, and the books that make us who we are.

Vivian Gornick is the author of many books including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, named the best memoir of the past fifty years by The New York Times Book Review in 2019; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications. She lives in New York City.