Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1161467 in Books
• Published on: 1997-05-27
• Released on: 1997-05-27
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.02" h x .63" w x 5.21" l, .58 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Amazon.com
In this collection of essays, fiction writer and critic Cynthia Ozick has chosen to take on an important topic for all writers: how the lives and works of authors fit in with the times. It is a task she manages with more than a healthy helping of wryness. As Ozick describes it, the subject of this collection is "famous literary figures in our famously rotten century who have been associated with one sort of folly or another." With that in mind, she offers a wide-ranging set of essays on Isaac Babel; H. G. Wells and Henry James; Anthony Trollope; the American Academy of Arts and Letters' early-century disdain for modernism; and more.

From Publishers Weekly
Ozick is a spectacular essayist. In that most difficult and often self-indulgent of forms, she can make readers feel as if whole new vistas of ideas have been opened, analyzed and communicated. The first piece in this collection, "T.S. Eliot at 101," will remind college students of the 1960s of how much the poet meant and of how intently they listened to his voice. Eliot ignored and no longer taught-how can that be? Ozick is equally amazing when she spoofs literary pretension in "Helping T.S. Eliot Write Better," a piece one wants to copy and fax to friends. But like all serendipitous collections, this offering is frustratingly uneven, with fictional riffs and meetings with bibliophiles and long-dead writers adjacent to disquisitions on Henry James and attacks on the shortsighted American cultural establishment. At the risk of feeling ungrateful, the reader will wish to have encountered these pieces one at a time, in different seasons. All the same, however bumpy the ride in this collection, Ozick's insights and observations on writers such as Eliot and Saul Bellow and her intense awareness of the implications of this post-Holocaust world cannot be duplicated.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
These two collections reflect the imaginative, inventive, and insightful Ozick. Some of the best of Ozick as poet, essayist, and fiction writer is represented in A Cynthia Ozick Reader, including the poems "Greeks," "The Fish in the Net," and "When That with Tragic Rapture Moses Stood" and the short stories "Envy," "Virility," and "Puttermesser and Xanthippe." Besides seven poems and seven fiction pieces, including a selection from Ozick's epic novel, Trust, there are eight provocative essays taken from her previous collections, focusing on the secret humanness underlying the literary lives of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, the demise of a literary culture, classical vs. modern feminism, and her cherished Henry James. This anthology is a good introduction to the range of styles, themes, and ideas in her writing. Essayist Ozick shines further in Fame & Folly, a new collection of 17 typically provocative, sometimes witty essays. Most of these focus on the various life experiences, foibles, and follies of selected literary figures. In the first essay, "T.S. Eliot at 101," Ozick reflects on how Eliot was revered in colleges in the Forties, Fifties, and early Sixties and is almost ignored today. She revisits Eliot in "Helping T. S. Eliot Write Better," an entertaining literary spoof in which, among other things, confusion between T.S. Eliot and George Eliot reigns. In other essays, Ozick focuses on Christian heroism and the Holocaust or reflects on the state of American culture, while a couple of the essays are short fictional pieces. The wide variations in themes and length tend to make this collection uneven and jumbled. Separating the pieces into at least two distinct categories would have lessened frustration for readers. Nevertheless, the essays are well worth reading. Both of these collections should be in public and academic libraries.?Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.