A top-notch literary talent invites readers to find new inspiration in these works, and in her own.
A poignant, nostalgic collection of literary criticism by one of America’s premier authors, gathered in the aftermath of her husband’s recent death.
After 48 years of marriage, the author’s husband, Ontario Review founder and editor Raymond Smith, died unexpectedly in February 2008. In a remarkably forthright and moving preface, Oates (A Fair Maiden, 2010, etc.) explains the emotionally fraught “rough terrain” from which many of these essays derived. For example, because she was working on “Boxing: History, Art, Culture” when her husband passed away, she could return to the essay “only sporadically, with a residual sort of excitement, as there might be observed, in the waning light of the iris of the eye of a decapitated beast.” In these selections, divided into “Classics” (e.g., Poe, Dickinson, Malamud), “Contemporaries” (Updike, Doctorow, Rushdie, Atwood) and “Nostalgias” (“Nostalgia 1970: City on Fire”), the author effectively combines her highly tuned sensibilities, sharp research and concise, vivid prose. As a fiction writer of the highest order, Oates shares her subjects’ writerly obsessions with mortality, loss and death. She recalls, for example, the oeuvre of Poe and its effect on her own early work, and of Emily Dickinson, who offered a “fusion of female stoicism and pragmatism.” The author writes that Annie Leibovitz’s recent book of photographs containing excruciating shots of her dying friend Susan Sontag has the “heft and intransigence of a grave marker.” She admires the work of James Salter, whose heroines are “women in extremis, for whom all pretense has vanished,” and the poetry of Sharon Olds for that “something subversive, even mutinous in the poet’s unflinching child-eye.” Always a teacher, Oates imbues each essay with a careful sifting of the evidence and consistently acute observations.
A top-notch literary talent invites readers to find new inspiration in these works, and in her own.Pub Date: June 29, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196398-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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