1998, ISBN: 0375501274

Hardcover

[EAN: 9780375501272], Gebraucht, wie neu, [PU: Random House], LITERATURE, CRITICISM, Jacket, First Edition, 2nd printing. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "'It is … More...

[EAN: 9780375501272], Gebraucht, wie neu, [PU: Random House], LITERATURE, CRITICISM, Jacket, First Edition, 2nd printing. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "'It is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life,' wrote Henry James, 'that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one's morality.' Newness and rootedness are the twin poles of SIGHT-READINGS, Elizabeth Hardwick's brilliant new collection of essays. (Her first, Seduction and Betrayal, was nominated for the National Book Award.) Hardwick's focus here is on American writers, at home and abroad, and especially women, as writers and as characters: Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion, among others. [] In sections on Old New York, Americans Abroad, and Fictions of America, Hardwick considers writers and their landscapes, real and imagined. Her essays on Edith Wharton and Henry James illuminate aspects of their inventions of New York. From there she takes us to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, into the hermetic world of Boston Transcendentalism, and on to the suburbs of John Cheever, the America of Philip Roth and John Updike, and the restless expanses of Richard Ford and the Prairie poets. [] Elizabeth Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant criticism. Her essays on American writers are themselves a work of literature." [jacket copy] "Elizabeth Hardwick stands first among America's most significant literary essayists, and she is surely the most surprising. Her essays have plots, contingencies, revelations; her unexpected images burst into insights; the turnings of her sentences astonish. Literature, history, social criticism, and an original and cryptically brilliant intelligence meet in this engrossing--and permanent--collection."--Cynthia Ozick. "Hardwick's latest roundup of literary essays is a gallery of startling portraits. She presents novelist Edith Wharton as a freewheeling social historian who used New York City as a frame of reference in her dissection of American society's heartlessness and predatory sexuality. Peering behind New England protofeminist Margaret Fuller's 'dramatic and romantic presentation of herself,' Hardwick finds an eccentric full of mannerisms, a 'profoundly urban,' unlikely convert to Transcendentalism, 'which nearly turned her into a fool.' Whether she is plumbing Joan Didion's roots in the American West, John Updike's learned obsession with sexuality, Katherine Anne Porter's flagrant fabrications about her past or John Cheever's alcoholism and 'gentrification' of his concealed homosexual lusts, the eminent critic and novelist combines passionate engagement with her subjects and a conversational style informed by prodigious scholarship. In her close readings of Henry James, Philip Roth, Djuna Barnes, Vachel Lindsay, Gertrude Stein and Edgar Lee Masters, Hardwick succeeds in her abiding goal of relating literature to life, making these lapidary essays (most of which appeared in the New York Review of Books) into uncanny reconnoiterings of the American psyche."--Publishers Weekly. Pristine hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in a sharp & intact jacket. Quite presentable., Books<

1998, ISBN: 0375501274

[EAN: 9780375501272], Used, very good, [PU: Random House, USA], Jacket, HARDBACK IN JACKET 1998. Clean & tight. No inscriptions. Jacket is now under clear removable protective covers. Dis… More...

[EAN: 9780375501272], Used, very good, [PU: Random House, USA], Jacket, HARDBACK IN JACKET 1998. Clean & tight. No inscriptions. Jacket is now under clear removable protective covers. Dispatched ROYAL MAIL FIRST CLASS with TRACKING next working day or sooner securely boxed in cardboard. ref 97/26. Sight-Readings: American Fictions by Elizabeth Hardwick, Books<

1998, ISBN: 9780375501272

Random House Publishing Group, 1998. Hardcover. Acceptable. Former library book; Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less… More...

Random House Publishing Group, 1998. Hardcover. Acceptable. Former library book; Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed., Random House Publishing Group, 1998, 2.5<