American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
One of the most gifted literary essayists of his generation defends stylistic boldness and intellectual daring in American letters.
Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist, “a literature-besotted Midas of prose” (Cynthia Ozick). Now, American Audacity gathers a selection of his most powerful considerations of American writers and themes—a “gorgeous fury of language and sensibility” (Walter Kirn)—including an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American literature, and a new appreciation of James Baldwin’s genius for nonfiction.
With potent insights into the storied tradition of American letters, and written with a “commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language,” American Audacity considers giants from the past (Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee, Denis Johnson), some of our most well-known living critics and novelists (Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer), as well as those cultural-literary themes that have concerned Giraldi as an American novelist (bestsellers, the “problem” of Catholic fiction, the art of hate mail, and his viral essay on bibliophilia).
Demanding that literature be audacious, and urgent in its convictions, American Audacity is itself an act of intellectual daring, a compendium shot through with Giraldi’s “emboldened and emboldening critical voice” (Sven Birkerts). At a time when literature is threatened by ceaseless electronic bombardment, Giraldi argues that literature “must do what literature has always done: facilitate those silent spaces, remain steadfastly itself in its employment of slowness, interiority, grace, and in its marshaling of aesthetic sophistication and complexity.”
American Audacity is ultimately an assertion of intelligence and discernment from a maker of “perfectly paced prose” (The New Yorker), a book that reaffirms the pleasure and wisdom of the deepest literary values.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a wide-ranging and provocative collection of essays most previously published novelist and memoirist Giraldi (The Hero's Body) examines an array of American writers, praising those who successfully marry style and substance. He draws astute portraits of notable critics, including Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, and James Wolcott, and novelists, including Herman Melville, Harper Lee, and Richard Ford, while also touching on such topics as "the art of hate mail" and "the problem of the Catholic novelist." An essay on the memoir concludes that the burden of writing about oneself is "to be more trustworthy, more discerning and dignified, artful and interior" and "unafraid of sounding the fathoms of the soul." Giraldi admires Cynthia Ozick because she wields, in her critical writing, an "apprehension of uncommon exactitude and style" that demonstrates how criticism can be an art form in its own right. In a previously unpublished essay, Giraldi praises James Baldwin not for his political stance but because Baldwin is so "smart and sane it's impossible to read him... and not sense yourself growing smarter and saner by the page." The same can be said of Giraldi's graceful case for the value of good writing.
