Vintage International
4 total works
A devastating vision of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness it left in the lives of those who passed through it.
With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers poring 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. Labouring 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 paradise found is paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS is a tour de force by one of America's most visionary novelists.
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.
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.
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.