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Title: American Fictions (Modern Library (Paperback)) by Elizabeth Hardwick ISBN: 0-375-75482-2 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful and difficult...
Comment: This book contains 27 of Hardwick's literary critical essays--and they are gems. The essays are arranged in themes (e.g., "Old New York," "Victims and Victors") around particular authors (e.g., Edith Wharton, Henry James, the Prairie poets, and so forth). Her essays concern novelists and short-story writers, but she has several essays on those who come from poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose. Her introductory essay, "Locations," is worth the price of the book alone.
Elizabeth Hardwick writes so fluently that you find her drawing imaginative comparisons, remarkable analogies, and passionate connections. She strikes me as forgiving the personal foibles and erratic paths of some writers, while she searches for how these informed the writings.
My favorite essay was her commentary on the American novelist Joan Didion ("In the Wasteland"), whose "unconsoling" work is "a carefully designed frieze on the fracture and splinter of her characters' comprehension of the world," marked by a peculiar unease and restlessness. Yet she also considers "older" American novelists (Melville, even has comments on Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Wharton). Her essays about more modern writers (the loss of bearing, from Fitzgerald's Gatsby to Capote's murderers, to Mailer's squalid "real" life) are also remarkable.
I am puzzled that Hardwick has no essays about American protest literature, or any reformulation images. She does not write about any African-American writer, and I wonder about this omission. Is she saying implicitly that these writers have no location in American literature?
Rating: 5
Summary: Review
Comment: How seldom one finds readable, perceptive criticism that does what it's supposed to: enhance one's pleasure and understanding of the original work. The New Yorker comparison to Kael is apt; Hardwick's criticism is itself high art. These are collections of previous essays. The very best are those on "Bartleby", "Washington Square" and "House of Mirth". Excellent!
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Title: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York Review Books Classics) by Elizabeth Hardwick, Joan Didion ISBN: 0940322781 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 13 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Early Stories : 1953-1975 by JOHN UPDIKE ISBN: 1400040728 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Sleepless Nights (New York Review Books Classics) by Elizabeth Hardwick, Geoffrey O'Brien ISBN: 0940322722 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 13 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 (PRIZE STORIES (O HENRY AWARDS)) by Laura Furman ISBN: 1400031311 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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