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In March 1989 The New Yorker ran a two-part article that opened with a sentence journalists still argue about: “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.” Its author, Janet Malcolm, had arrived in New York from Prague as a five-year-old in 1939. She joined The New Yorker in 1963, writing about children’s books and home décor, then photography, and only turned to reporting in 1978. Over the next four decades she wrote about psychoanalysts, a convicted murderer and his biographer, Sylvia Plath’s biographers, Chekhov, Gertrude Stein and a murder trial in Queens, and she put her own role as the observer under the same scrutiny. She died in 2021. This guide covers her 12 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1980–2023 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Janet Malcolm’s best-known books are The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), In the Freud Archives (1984), The Silent Woman (1994), Two Lives (2007) and Forty-One False Starts (2013). Start with The Journalist and the Murderer. Below are her 12 key books in order, the rest of her work, and the story of the libel case that followed her for ten years.
Where to Start with Janet Malcolm
If you want her most famous argument
→ The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) — a journalist, a convicted murderer and a lawsuit.
If you want literary biography and its problems
→ The Silent Woman (1994) — Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and the people who wrote about them.
If you want a courtroom
→ Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011) — a short book on a murder trial in Queens.
If you want her essays
→ Forty-One False Starts (2013) — artists and writers, including the David Salle piece.
12 Janet Malcolm Books, in Order
Diana & Nikon
Her first book collects eleven essays on photography written for The New Yorker, reviews of exhibitions and books covering photographers such as Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon. Aperture published an expanded edition in 1997 with a new preface and five more essays.
Psychoanalysis
A portrait of a 46-year-old New York psychoanalyst she calls “Aaron Green”, built on long interviews about his training, his doubts and the factions in his profession, alternating with chapters on the history and theory of analysis. The title comes from Freud, who named analysis, with education and government, as one of the “impossible” professions. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
In the Freud Archives
First published in The New Yorker in 1983. Three men fight over Freud’s legacy: Kurt Eissler, head of the Sigmund Freud Archives; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a Sanskrit scholar Eissler had lined up as his successor, who was dismissed after attacking Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory; and Peter Swales, a self-styled “punk historian of psychoanalysis”. Masson’s libel suit over the book ran for ten years.
The Journalist and the Murderer
Joe McGinniss wrote Fatal Vision (1983) about Jeffrey MacDonald, the Army doctor convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970. MacDonald sued, saying McGinniss had kept pretending to believe him innocent to keep his cooperation; the 1987 trial ended in a hung jury and a reported 325,000-dollar settlement. Malcolm uses the case to examine the relationship between every writer and subject. It ran in The New Yorker in March 1989, set off a long debate in the press, and is No. 97 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.
The Silent Woman
A book about the biographers of Sylvia Plath rather than about Plath herself. Malcolm meets Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes’s sister and the guardian of the estate, the poet Anne Stevenson, whose authorised biography Bitter Fame (1989) was attacked as taking the Hugheses’ side, the critic Jacqueline Rose and others. The book is a critique of literary biography and largely a defence of Ted and Olwyn Hughes. It first ran in The New Yorker in August 1993.
The Crime of Sheila McGough
Sheila McGough, a defence lawyer, was convicted in 1990 of helping her client Bob Bailes, a con man with many convictions, cheat a third party out of 75,000 dollars; she served three years in prison and was disbarred. After her release she wrote to Malcolm, who re-examines the case and argues that a trial produces a tidy story that real events do not fit.
Reading Chekhov
A short book that mixes a trip through post-Soviet Russia, to Moscow, St Petersburg, Gurzuf and Yalta, where Chekhov spent his last years, with close readings of his stories and plays, among them “Ward No. 6”, and the conflicting memoirs of his death.
Two Lives
How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, two Jewish American women, came through the Second World War in a French village under Vichy rule, a question Malcolm follows to the protection of the Vichy official Bernard Faÿ. The book is also a reading of Stein’s writing and a study of what biographers can know about a couple. It won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2008.
Iphigenia in Forest Hills
In 2007 the orthodontist Daniel Malakov was shot dead at a playground in Queens in front of his four-year-old daughter, weeks after he won custody of her. His estranged wife, the physician Mazoltuv Borukhova, and the gunman, Mikhail Mallayev, were tried together in 2009 and sentenced to life without parole. Malcolm, who covered the trial for The New Yorker, writes about the judge, the lawyers, the Bukharan Jewish community of Forest Hills and her own doubts.
Forty-One False Starts
Essays from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The title piece is a profile of the painter David Salle written as forty-one openings; others cover Julia Margaret Cameron, Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, Irving Penn, J. D. Salinger, the Bloomsbury group and the Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy. It was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
Nobody’s Looking at You
Her last collection published in her lifetime: profiles of the designer Eileen Fisher (the title piece), the pianist Yuja Wang, the sisters who run the Argosy Bookshop in New York and the television host Rachel Maddow, followed by pieces on Tolstoy, the translator Constance Garnett, Ted Hughes and others.
Still Pictures
Published after her death: short pieces, each built around a family photograph, about her childhood in Prague, the family’s escape to New York in 1939, her father’s practice among Czech refugees in Yorkville and her mother. The book has 29 photographs, an introduction by Ian Frazier and an afterword by her daughter, Anne Malcolm.
In What Order to Read Janet Malcolm
None of Malcolm’s books continue from one another, so you can read by subject. Two pairs do belong together. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives are her two books about psychoanalysis, and the second makes more sense after the first. In the Freud Archives also belongs next to The Journalist and the Murderer, which she wrote while Masson’s lawsuit over the earlier book was still in the courts.
Her books on trials, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Crime of Sheila McGough and Iphigenia in Forest Hills, read well as a set. So do the books on biography: The Silent Woman, Two Lives and, in a lighter way, Reading Chekhov. Leave Still Pictures, her unfinished memoir, until last.
A reading path
1. The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)
2. The Silent Woman (1994)
3. In the Freud Archives (1984)
4. Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011)
5. Forty-One False Starts (2013)
6. Still Pictures (2023)
Everything Else Janet Malcolm Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 5 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Collections and photography
2
2 books · 1992–2008
- 1992The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writingssixteen essays and reports, from Freud’s Dora case to a trip to Prague in 1990
- 2008Burdockher own colour photographs of burdock leaves
Chekhov selections she chose and introduced
3
3 books · 2018–2020
- 2018The Lady with the Little Dog and Other StoriesChekhov in Constance Garnett’s translation
- 2020The Duel and Other StoriesChekhov in Constance Garnett’s translation
- 2020Ward No. 6 and Other StoriesChekhov in Constance Garnett’s translation
The years · 1934–2021
Quick facts about Janet Malcolm
- Known for
- Long, sceptical New Yorker reporting that questions how journalists, biographers and courts turn real people into stories, including her own part in it.
- 1934
- Born Jana Wienerová in Prague
- 1963
- Starts writing for The New Yorker
- 2008
- PEN award for Two Lives
- 2021
- Dies in New York, aged 86
- Born
- 8 July 1934, Prague, as Jana Klara Wienerová; her family left for New York in 1939
- Education
- University of Michigan
- Worked
- The New Yorker, from 1963 until her death; also The New York Review of Books
- Married
- Donald Malcolm (died 1975); then the New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford, in 1975
- Honours
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001); PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award (2008); Academy Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism (2017)
- Died
- 16 June 2021, New York City, of lung cancer
The red mark is 1990: The Journalist and the Murderer, her book about Joe McGinniss and Jeffrey MacDonald.
How Janet Malcolm Writes: The Observer Under Observation
Malcolm’s recurring subject is the relationship between the person telling a story and the people in it. The Journalist and the Murderer is about a writer and his subject, The Silent Woman about biographers and the dead, The Crime of Sheila McGough and Iphigenia in Forest Hills about how a trial turns events into a narrative. She includes herself in the scrutiny: her own interviews, her sympathies and her doubts are part of the record.
Her method was long interviews, recorded on tape, with subjects left to talk at length: Aaron Green in Psychoanalysis, Masson in In the Freud Archives. She then shaped the material into a few scenes and long quoted passages, and commented on them in her own voice. Her father was a psychiatrist, and her early work on psychoanalysis shows in how she reads people: through what they reveal without meaning to, and through how they react to the person listening.
Her later books are short and often unusual in form. Reading Chekhov runs to about 140 pages and Iphigenia in Forest Hills to about 155; “Forty-One False Starts” is a profile made of abandoned openings; Still Pictures is built on family photographs. She was also a visual artist: Burdock (2008) is a book of her photographs, and her collages were shown in galleries.
Watch
Janet Malcolm reads at Kelly Writers House
On 18 March 2013, during her visit to the University of Pennsylvania as a Kelly Writers House Fellow, Malcolm read from her work and talked about it, one of the few recordings of her reading in public.
Frequently asked questions about Janet Malcolm’s books
How many books has Janet Malcolm written?
This page lists 14 books of her own: the 12 key books plus The Purloined Clinic (1992) and Burdock (2008). She also chose and introduced three selections of Chekhov’s stories in Constance Garnett’s translation (2018–2020), and Aperture published an expanded edition of Diana & Nikon in 1997.
What are Janet Malcolm’s books in order?
Her key books in order: Diana & Nikon (1980), Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), The Silent Woman (1994), The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999), Reading Chekhov (2001), Two Lives (2007), Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011), Forty-One False Starts (2013), Nobody’s Looking at You (2019) and Still Pictures (2023).
Where should I start with Janet Malcolm?
The Journalist and the Murderer: it is short, it contains her best-known argument, and it leads to most of her other subjects. If you would rather start with essays, try Forty-One False Starts; for literature, The Silent Woman.
What is Janet Malcolm’s most famous book?
The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), which opens: “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.” It is No. 97 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.
What is The Journalist and the Murderer about?
Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision (1983), and Jeffrey MacDonald, the Army doctor convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970. MacDonald sued McGinniss for pretending to believe in his innocence; the 1987 trial ended in a hung jury and a reported 325,000-dollar settlement. McGinniss called Malcolm’s account full of “omissions, distortions and outright misstatements of fact”.
What was the Masson v. New Yorker libel case?
In 1984 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the main subject of In the Freud Archives, sued Malcolm, The New Yorker and Knopf for libel, saying she had invented quotations, including his description of himself as an “intellectual gigolo”. The lower courts dismissed the case, but in 1991 the Supreme Court (Masson v. New Yorker Magazine) ruled that altered quotations can be libellous if they materially change the meaning, and sent it to a jury. A 1993 jury found against Malcolm on two quotations but could not agree on damages. At the retrial, in November 1994, the jury found that two quotations were false and one defamatory, but that she had not acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and cleared her. In 1995 she said she had found a mislaid notebook containing three of the disputed quotations.
What is The Silent Woman about?
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, seen through the people who wrote about them after Plath’s death in 1963: Anne Stevenson, author of Bitter Fame (1989), Olwyn Hughes, the critic Jacqueline Rose and others. The book questions what biographers are entitled to know and largely defends the Hugheses.
Did Janet Malcolm win any prizes?
Two Lives won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2008. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession was a National Book Award finalist and Forty-One False Starts was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001 and received its Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism in 2017.
Is Janet Malcolm still alive?
No. She died of lung cancer on 16 June 2021 in New York, aged 86. Her last book, Still Pictures, came out in 2023 with an afterword by her daughter, Anne Malcolm.
Footnotes
- Janet Malcolm — Wikipedia
- The Journalist and the Murderer — Wikipedia
- Masson v. New Yorker Magazine — Free Speech Center, MTSU
- Janet Malcolm, The Art of Nonfiction No. 4 — The Paris Review
- Going Underground (The Silent Woman) — London Review of Books
- Janet Malcolm, provocative author-journalist, dies at 86 — AP
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“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.”
— Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)
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