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Ozick, Cynthia : Metaphor & Memory: Essays

Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, NY, 1989

ISBN 0394566254

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 283 pages. The author's second collection of essays. One of the finest literary collections of the 20th century. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Cynthia Ozick's "Metaphor & Memory: Essays". Thirty essays by Cynthia Ozick, ample proof, if proof were ever needed, that the author is not only a great novelist and short-story writer, but also one of America's best literary critics. Includes essays on Henry James (her single greatest obsession), Chekhov, Cyril Connolly, Italo Calvino, William Gaddis, Saul Bellow, J. M. Coetzee, and some of the most acute essays on Jewish culture, identity, and heritage ever written. An Ozick essay is always cause for celebration. She writes piercingly and critically, but always with an unself-conscious and unindulgent sympathy for her subject, against her better judgment, and even while she is tearing him or her to shreds. She is writing in three literary traditions simultaneously, all of them at the most profound level imaginable: The ancient Jewish, the modern European, and the Jamesian American. Hence, the dazzling allusiveness, poignant beauty, and sheer intensity of her work. Her prose style - imbricated, brachiate, and filigreed, to borrow three of her own favorite words - is a paradox: The rush of metaphors arrives at and realizes a work of luminous beauty. "Sympathy can be an offense against the truth" (Cynthia Ozick). An absolute "must-have" title for Cynthia Ozick collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Cynthia Ozick. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a great book. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for "Fame & Folly". Finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 for "The Puttermesser Papers". Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for "Quarrel & Quandary". Recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. One of the greatest American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER CYNTHIA OZICK TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0394566254.

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