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  • Published: 5 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241981269
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

The Anna Karenina Fix

Life Lessons from Russian Literature




A literary self-help memoir about using the Russian Classics to find the answer to life's most important questions

Viv Groskop has discovered the meaning of life in Russian literature. As she knows from personal experience, everything that has ever happened in life has already happened in these novels: from not being sure what to do with your life (Anna Karenina) to being in love with someone who doesn't love you back enough (The Master and Margarita),or being socially anxious about your appearance (all of Chekhov's work). This is a literary self-help memoir, with examples from the author's own life that reflect the lessons of literature, only in a much less poetic way than Tolstoy probably intended, and with an emphasis on being excessively paranoid about having an emerging moustache on your upper lip, just like Natasha in War and Peace.

  • Published: 5 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241981269
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Viv Groskop

Viv Groskop is a writer, stand-up comedian and TV and radio presenter. She has hosted book tours for Graham Norton and Jo Brand and is a veteran of four Edinburgh Fringe shows. She is the author of How to Own the Room and host of the chart-topping podcast of the same name. She has presented BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Saturday Review. As an executive coach, she works with women across business, media and advertising, helping them to hone their authority, presence and leadership.

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Praise for The Anna Karenina Fix

Wonderfully entertaining, hilarious. Contains the distilled wisdom of some of the greatest writers who ever lived. Explored with dancing wit, affection and brilliance, this is a passionate, hilarious, joyful love letter to Russian literature.

Allison Pearson, Sunday Telegraph

Enchanting. Groskop falls in love with the literature, her impressive knowledge of which she conveys with a charmingly breezy tone

Observer

A beguiling tasting menu of some of the finest reading experiences of my life. Witty, likeable, and lighthearted, Viv Groskop invites us to embrace the work of these august Russian dead souls as belonging to us all

Lionel Shriver

Groskop has a knack of giving you just enough biography of the author, just enough tantalising kiss-and-tell detail from the works . . . A delightful primer and companion to all the authors you are ashamed to admit you haven't read

The Times

What does Tolstoy have in common with Oprah Winfrey? What can Chekhov teach us about body image? In The Anna Karenina Fix, comedian Viv Groskop shows us how to use Russian literature as self-help, with hilarious and eye-opening results

Good Housekeeping

A wry literary memoir examining what we can learn from the great Russian novelists

Stylist

Funny and only second best to reading the stuff itself

Sara Wheeler, The Spectator

A highly knowledgeable jaunt through 150 years of literature

Observer