Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel "Heir to the Glimmering World" is known as "The Bear Boy" in the United Kingdom. It is fitting that this complex difficult novel will take two, or perhaps more, appropriate titles. "The Bear Boy" refers to one of the many principal characters in the book, James A'Bair. ...
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 dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary g...
At three in the afternoon—the hour when, all over the world, the Literary stewpot boils over, when gossip in the book-reviewing departments of newspapers is most untamed and swarming, and when the autumn sky over Stockholm begins to draw down a translucent dusk (an eggshell shielding a blue-black...
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 f...
Why did my mother marry Enoch Vand? Not for the reason William held—that public and plausible justification of an unjustifiable suddenness which, like the rest of my mother's fabrications drawn up to satisfy William's respectability, William gave out to me as conservatively as if he believed her ...
has been in fashion for some time now, but its embodiment has always been with us. Socrates was what we would call a public intellectual; and Isaiah; and Maimonides; and Voltaire; and Emerson. But observe: presumably not Aristotle, not Montaigne, not George Eliot, not Santayana. George Eliot pres...
THE GOLEM DESTROYS HER MAKER MAYOR PUTTERMESSER’S REPUTATION IS ebbing. The cost of municipal borrowing ascends. A jungle of graffiti springs up on the white flanks of marble sculptures inside museums; Attic urns are smashed. Barbarians cruise the streets. O New York! O lost New York! Deputy Comm...
He was an art critic; he was a book critic; he wrote on politics and morals; he wrote on everything. He was a journalist, both in print and weekly on the radio; he had "sensibility," but he was proud of being "focused." He was a Catholic; he read Cardinal Newman and François Mauriac and Étienne G...
And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I...
Iris said. “That’s what Julian called it when I got him to come. For dad’s sake, not that he cares.” The last minute, the eleventh hour. Bea had booked a midnight flight. In her odious room two floors above, her bags were packed and ready. “He thinks you’re going to crucify him,” Iris said. “Fatt...