Critics, monsters, fanatics, and other literary essays
"In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture. If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared -- if all we had were reviews that treated books li...
| Main Author: | Ozick, Cynthia (Author) |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Boston :
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2016.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: |
"In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture. If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared -- if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity -- could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age"--Provided by publisher. |
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| Physical Description: |
211 pages ; 22 cm |
| ISBN: |
9780544703711 0544703715 |
| Author Notes: |
Ozick wrote the novel Trust, and the short stories "The Sense of Europe", which was published in Prairie Schooner, and "The Shawl", which was included in The World of the Short Story. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Partisan Review, and Esquire. Ozick has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Harold Straus Living Award from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters. Three of her stories won first prize in the O. Henry competition. In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2000, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Quarrel & Quandary. Her novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) won high literary praise. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Malamud Award, which was established by Bernard Malamud¿s family to honor excellence in the art of the short story. Her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (2012). (Bowker Author Biography) |