Quarrel & Quandary
Essays
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In her new collection of essays, Cynthia Ozick, everywhere acclaimed as a critic, novelist, and storyteller, examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature.
She writes--quarrelsomely--about Crime and Punishment, about William Styron's Sophie's Choice, about the Book of Job. She inquires into the subterranean dispositions and quandaries of Kafka and Henry James. She discusses the difficulties inherent in the translation of great books, whether into film or into another language.
She explores what she calls "the selfishness of art" and courts controversy with her views on The Diary of Anne Frank and its transformation for the stage. Her reflections on the "rights of history" and the "rights of imagination" tap a profound concern for truth in regard to the Holocaust. She considers the shifting splendors of New York City, past and present. And she revisits her youth more deeply and with more feeling--and comedy--than ever before, in essays that reveal some of the formative experiences of her life as a writer.
Quarrel & Quandary is a literary event and a cause for celebration.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
H Novelist and literary critic Ozick (The Puttermesser Papers; Metaphor and Memory; etc.) again proves herself to be a daunting intellectual who writes with both grace and conviction. This collection of 19 previously published essays (in venues like the New Republic and Commentary) highlights the reasons for her status as one of America's leading literary figures. In "Dostoyevsky's Unabomber" she demonstrates her ability to uncover similarities across wide contextual gulfs by likening Theodore Kaczynski, "a calculating social reasoner and messianic utopian," to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. In "The Impious Impatience of Job" she calls upon her substantial knowledge of the Bible to rethink an oft-discussed tale. "How I Got Fired from My Summer Job" is a personal memoir about misplacement as a typist in an accounting firm upon completion of graduate school in literature. All in all, Ozick covers an almost unbelievable range of subjectsDfrom lovesickness to cinematic adaptations of Henry James's novels to the merits and beauty of a simple kitchen ladle. She also returns, fiercely, to the HolocaustDboth explicitly in"Who Owns Anne Frank?" and implicitly in"She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body"Dand other themes that she's explored previously. Ozick writes that Frank "was born to be a writer," that her "presence" is "thick rather than thin"; the same could be said of Ozick herselfDshe brings a novelist's fresh, frank eye to matters others might overlook and demonstrates a heightened consciousness of her own methods as a writer and public figure. And though she confesses a resistance to the political, she in fact succeeds in redefining the notion of the political through these fine essays, making it something subtle and deeply transformative.
