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.
The collapse of her brief marriage has stalled Bea Nightingale's life, leaving her middle-aged and alone, teaching in an impoverished borough of 1950s New York. A plea from her estranged brother gives Bea the excuse to escape lassitude by leaving for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows; but the siren call of Europe threatens to deafen Bea to the dangers of entangling herself in the lives of her brother's family. The story of Bea's travails on the continent is a fierce and heartbreaking insight into the curious nature of love: how it can be commanded and abused; earned and cherished; or even lost altogether.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Cynthia Ozick's fiction has been awarded multiple O. Henry Prizes. In Foreign Bodies, Ozick crafts a remarkable retelling of Henry James' The Ambassadors-deftly using its plot, yet boldly infusing the novel with an all new place, time, and meaning. It's 1952, and middle-aged Bea Nightingale reluctantly agrees to fly to Paris to help convince her estranged runaway nephew to return to his family. But Bea's experiences abroad will change her forever.
A short story and a novella The Shawl which
together tell an exquisitely powerful and moving tale of the Holocaust.
At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, The Shawl and Rosa succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both The Shawl and Rosa won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.
The Shawl a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In Rosa that same woman appears thirty years later, a madwoman and a scavenger in a Miami hotel. And in both stories there is a shawl a shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her, or even magically conjure her back to life.
Cynthia Ozick has won many accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Heir to the Glimmering World is a highly atmospheric novel set in New York in the 1930s. When a young woman becomes assistant to a German professor living in the Bronx, she must find her place in his chaotic household and learn to navigate the eccentric generosity of his benefactor, an aging Christopher Robin.
