Best Selling Books by Cynthia Ozick

From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award comes a story about the Holocaust that "burns itself into the reader''s imagination with almost surreal powers" (The New York Times). "Read this great little book of Cynthia Ozick''s: It contains dazzling staggering pages filled with sadness and truth." —Elie Wiesel, Chicago Tribune A devastating vision of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness it left in the lives of those who passed through it.

Quarrel & Quandary showcases the manifold talents of one of our leading and award-winning critics and essayists. In nineteen opulent essays, Cynthia Ozick probes Dostoevsky for insights into the Unabomber, questions the role of the public intellectual, and dares to wonder what poetry is. She roams effortlessly from Kafka to James, Styron to Stein, and, in the book''s most famous essay, dissects the gaudy commercialism that has reduced Anne Frank to "usable goods." Courageous, audacious, and sublime, these essays have the courage of conviction, the probing of genius, and the durable audacity to matter.

""[Ozick''s] range of influences is obvious in the fine selections of poems and short stories as well as essays from Art & Ardor (1983) and Metaphor and Memory (1989) that Kauvar has so sensitively chosen."" --Booklist ""[This collection reflects] 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."" --Library Journal ""Gathered here are some bristling, incandescent tales and thorny essays that show Ozick at her finest."" --The Seattle Times Cynthia Ozick is among the ten most important writers in North America today. This Reader brings her manifold talents together in a sampler of the many genres she explores. The poems, stories, and essays in this collection burst with all the energy of her capacious imagination. For those who have always lauded her, the Reader offers a representative selection; those new to Cynthia Ozick''s work will revel in the discovery of a major writer.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The Puttermesser Papers follows Ruth Puttermesser, a highly learned woman living in New York City, who creates a female golem to fulfill her yearning for a daughter and becomes mayor, only to face the unintended consequences of her fantasies. "A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality." Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. "The finest achievement of Ozick''s career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times

A collection of readings relevant to the development of an intercultural psychology which takes into account the different circumstances, needs, values, constructions of reality, and worldviews and belief systems that significantly shape the experience and behavior of cultural groups. The 34 papers and introductory essay are arranged in four parts: the politics of difference; development, adaption, and the acquisition of culture; self and other in cultural context; and diagnostic assessment, treatment, and cultural bias. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From one of America''s great literary figures, a new collection of essays on eminent writers and their work, and on the war between art and life. The perilous intersection of writers'' lives with public and private domains is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary giants as T. S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdie, and Henry James. "A genuine literary education. . . . Each of these pieces is informed, gracefully written and propelled with narrative energy."—San Francisco Chronicle "A glittering new collection. . . . Each essay shimmers with intelligence."—The New York Times

A small group of Jews weave a web of intrigue and fantasy around a book reviewer''s contention that he is the son of Borus Schultz, the legendary Polish writer killed by the Nazis before his magnum opus, THE MESSIAH, could be brought to light.

From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes a new collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art''s contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.

It is the stories upon which Cynthia Ozick''s literary reputation rests. She writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness. She has created a timeless collection in which Greek mythology, superstition and the religious and cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in America collide. The Pagan Rabbi is seduced by a tree sprite after seeing his daughter rescued from drowning by a water sprite. Such ecstasy is not permitted to mortals and so the scholar must die. He hangs himself with his prayer shawl as he watches the strangely beautiful nymph decay. In Envy, a Yiddish poet who watches the success of a contemporary, becomes very like a character in an I.B. Singer story entrapped by his anguish and haunted by the memory of a child. In the Doctor''s Wife, the most gentle of the stories, a poor doctor not unlike Chekhov endures family life in which he is adored by his three sisters and oppressed by his family obligations. In these stories, we see Ozick defining herself and her literary territory. The stories may be read purely as evocations of Jewish experience, where time seems to have by-passed these characters. In the Butterfly and the Traffic Light, Jerusalem is seen upon a hill as only it can be in legend, and America is said not to have cities scarred by battles. This is a dazzling collection of short stories by an internationally celebrated novelist.

**** Reprint of the Knopf edition that is cited in BCL3. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A collection of essays on the joys of great literature from the New York Times–bestselling author and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of America’s foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. Her new collection of spirited essays focuses on the essential joys of great literature, with particular emphasis on the novel. With razor-sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, she investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and others. In a posthumous and hilariously harassing “(Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James,” Ozick’s hero is shocked by a lady reporter. In “Highbrow Blues,” and in reflections on her own early fiction, she writes intimately of “the din in our heads, that relentless inner hum,” and the curative power of literary imagination. The Din in the Head is sure to please fans of Ozick, win her new readers, and excite critical controversy and acclaim. “Open the collection anywhere—I guarantee it—and you will feel the bite of her distinctive voice.” —Sven Birkerts, Los Angeles Times “The passion that fills these essays is invigorating. In our age of irony and commercial pandering, we need writers like Ozick.” —Danielle Chapman, Chicago Tribune

In her sixth novel, Cynthia Ozick retells the story of Henry James’s The Ambassadors as a photographic negative, retaining the plot but reversing the meaning. Foreign Bodies transforms Henry James’s prototype into a brilliant, utterly original, new American classic. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to leave New York for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of her brother’s family and even, after so long, her ex-husband. Every one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months in that fateful year. Traveling from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, facing her ex-husband and finally shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, Bea Nightingale is a newly liberated divorcee who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the very people she tries to help.

Contains an essay on Virginia Woolf, Edith Warton and Gertrud Kolmar.

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school''s ethos and his fascination with his own family''s heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt''s Elephantine Island. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick''s most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.

Partial Contents: (1) Remembering Maurice Samuels (2) Justice to Feminism.

From one of America''s great literary figures, a collection of essays on eminent writers and their work, and on the war between art and life. The perilous intersection of writers'' lives with public and private dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary giants as T.S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdie and Henry James.

A collection of essays that touch on the inner life of literaure and of the literary artist. Among the subjects covered are childhood''s passionate reading; ambition; the decline of the book as a universal habit; the consequences of gender politics; and the deceptions and impersonations of art.

In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture. If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared — if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity — could the novel survive? 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-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age.

Four stories of comedy, deception, and revenge (including one previously unpublished) showcases heroes who suffer from willful self-deceit. These not-so-innocents proceed from self-deception to deceiving others, who do not take it lightly. The novella "Dictation" imagines a fateful meeting between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of their fame. Timid Miss Hallowes, who types for Conrad, comes under the influence of James''s Miss Bosanquet, high-spirited, flirtatious, and scheming. In a masterstroke of genius, Ozick hatches a plot between them to insert themselves into posterity.--From publisher description.

Art & Ardor was the first of Cynthia Ozick''s collections of her non-fiction pieces, and covers the longest span (1968 to 1983) of the now seven volumes. First printed in a variety of publications, these pieces appeared in not only The New Republic, Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books, but also Mademoiselle and Ms.

Cynthia Ozick is an American master at the height of her powers in Heir to the Glimmering World, a grand romantic novel of desire, fame, fanaticism, and unimaginable reversals of fortune set in the outskirts of the Bronx in the 1930s, a novel of generous delight.--Adapted from front book flap.

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 In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school''s ethos and his fascination with his own family''s heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt''s Elephantine Island. Included alongside this wondrous tale, touched by unsettling irony and with the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, are four additional stories in Cynthia Ozick''s brilliant, distinctive voice, weaving myth and mania, history and illusion: The Coast of New Zealand, The Bloodline of the Alkanas, Sin, and A Hebrew Sibyl.

In the outskirts of the Bronx in 1930s New York, the Mitwisser clan are German refugees who survive at the whim of their vagabond benefactor, James A''Bair. James is heir to the fortune amassed by his father, the author of a wildly popular series of children''s books called The Bear Boy. Into their chaotic household comes Rose Meadows, orphaned at the age of eighteen. Employed as an assistant to the eccentric Professor Mitwisser, Rose''s position within the family is precarious, especially when the arrival of James threatens the fragile balance of the household.

Una magnífica edición ilustrada de una pieza imprescindible de la narrativa del siglo XX: El chal de la candidata al premio Nobel de Literatura Cynthia Ozick, con prólogo de Berta Vias Mahou. Un trapo que gotea leche, el sabor extraño de un dedo en la boca, un lugar sin piedad envuelto en alambres y tres nombres que estallan en la oscuridad: Rosa, Stella y Magda. Fueron los tiempos sin sentido en un campo de concentración donde el horror se repartía a granel, pero hubo quien logró sobrevivir, llevar su tragedia lejos e hilvanar un futuro. Stella ahora está en Nueva York y se ha inventado una vida nueva. Magda... Magda era muy niña cuando todo pasó. Rosa ha ido rodando como un botón maltrecho hasta las costas de Florida, y cultiva su extravagante cordura por las calles de Miami. Para ella no hay futuro porque todo es pasado y la memoria, terca, insiste en devolverle aquel chal sucio con sabor a leche y saliva... Con esas pocas cosas, casi nada para casi nadie, Cynthia Ozick construyó en 1977 esta pieza única en la literatura del siglo XX, y Oscar Astromujoff ha iluminado sus palabras con unas imágenes que indignan y emocionan. «Estas ilustraciones son hilos visionarios, gritos silenciosos que hieren el aire y se quedan grabados en la retina... Estoy emocionada.» Cynthia Ozick

Money and conscience are at the heart of Cynthia Ozick''s masterly first novel, narrated by a nameless young woman and set in the private world of wealthy New York, the dire landscape of postwar Europe, and the mythical groves of a Shakespearean isle. Beginning in the 1930s and extending through four decades, Trust is an epic tale of the narrator''s quest for her elusive father, a scandalous figure whom she has never known. In a provocative afterword, Ozick reflects on how she came to write the novel and discusses the cultural shift in the nature of literary ambition in the years since.

From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes a new collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art''s contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

" Aussi musicienne que Proust, par son sens des images et des suggestions continues(...) elle sait concentrer en quelques phrases le pervers et le ridicule d''un personnage ". J. M. de Montrémy La Croix " Cynthia Ozick peuple les rues de ses villes de survivants (...) ils ont perdu les racines de leur passé, parce qu''ils ont perdu la langue. Mais ils ne peuvent pas adhérer au présent. Ils ont émigré de la réalité. " Cécile Wajsbrot, Le Magazine Littéraire.