Showing results by author "Cynthia Ozick" in All Categories

Yearning for a life of the mind, Ruth Puttermesser finds herself mired in the lowest circles of city bureaucracy. Her love life hopeless, her fantasies more influential than wan reality, she nevertheless turns out to be the best mayor New York City has ever elected. Soon enough, though, paradise gained becomes paradise lost, and—even for a wistful visionary like Puttermesser—the problem of disappointment remains unresolved.

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-20th century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups.

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.

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings, now alongside four previously uncollected stories.

Apparso per la prima volta nel 1997 sulle pagine del "New Yorker", questo impetuoso, lucidissimo saggio di Cynthia Ozick strappa il velo di dissimulazione e retorica che negli anni ha ovattato e mistificato la limpida voce di Anne Frank e del suo Diario. Troppo spesso e troppo a lungo oggetto di interpretazioni semplificate e fuorvianti, di appropriazioni indebite, tradimenti e comode "santificazioni", il Diario è servito da lasciapassare per un'amnesia collettiva - storica e culturale - sulle cause e le circostanze della morte della sua autrice e di milioni di altre vittime dell'Olocausto.

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.

In 2008, Cynthia Ozick published a new collection of stories, Dictation, and won both the PEN/Malumud Award and PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement. This program is one of a series of afternoon talks, hosted by Roger Rosenblatt, which features intimate discussions with writers about their work, their passions and the books on their night tables.