Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays
    Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays
    Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays
    Audiobook7 hours

    Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

    Written by Cynthia Ozick

    Narrated by Donna Postel

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared-if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity-could the novel survive? In a gauntlet throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJul 5, 2016
    ISBN9781681680491
    Author

    Cynthia Ozick

    Author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, CYNTHIA OZICK is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Harper's, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.

    More audiobooks from Cynthia Ozick

    Related to Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Vigilantly Himself: Artists on Philip Roth’s Legacy

      May 29, 2018

      Al Alvarez, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and others remember Philip Roth, the creator of iconic characters Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman. 1. Intense [University of Chicago English professor Joan Bennett] invited us to tea to meet one of her studen

      9 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      Golden Gate Park As any poet will tell you, the weight of the lineis essential, but here these practitioners havemore on their minds than poems. The weight of their lines is uniformly light, the line selectedto land and then rest gently on the surfac

      2 min read

    • Article

      Who We Are, What We Do

      Jun 1, 2022

      Who We Are, What We Do
      8 min read

    • Article

      Creative Nonfiction

      Dec 15, 2020

      EDITOR Lee Gutkind MANAGING EDITOR Hattie Fletcher SENIOR EDITOR Chad Vogler SECTION EDITOR Dinty W. Moore Exploring the Boundaries EDITORIAL INTERNS & FACT CHECKERS Sarah Capdeville Stephanie Dinkmeyer Zoe Fowler READERS Stephanie Bane Becky Bosshar

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Slow Bloom of ‘Suite for Barbara Loden’

      Apr 19, 2019

      This 2018 publication of the novel brings closure to a 50-year saga, coinciding with the height of the #MeToo movement, which has given women everywhere renewed strength through common vulnerabilities. The post The Slow Bloom of ‘Suite for Barbara Lo

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Burning House

      Jul 2, 2018

      The Burning House
      14 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      Feb 2, 2022

      February brings new work from Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Haigh, and Marlon James, and moving debuts from Kiare Ladner, Maayan Eitan, and Neda Toloui-Semnani. The post February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Mi

      10 min read

    • Article

      An Archaeological Inquest

      Sep 1, 2022

      An Archaeological Inquest
      7 min read

    • Article

      How To Become A Cult Writer

      Apr 1, 2022

      How To Become A Cult Writer
      8 min read

    • Article

      Timelessness Trumps Timely

      Nov 26, 2020

      THE LITERARY CRITIC John Carey in 2000 published Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books. In it he warned of those who associate reading with “swank and false refinement” and argued for “pure reading-pleasure”. Crucially, fo

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

    3.5/5

    13 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This woman knows how to write about literature. Her piece on Kafka is brilliant as are the many other smaller gems sprinkled throughout the book. She inspires the reader to seek out new authors as I did reading through Edmund Wilson's The Dead Sea Scrolls piece. Her fiction is as good as her critical writing. I recommend The Messiah of Stockholm.
    • 3/5
      I had a mixed response to Cynthia Ozick's latest collection of essays, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays. One of the things I like best about Ozick as a critic is that she pulls no punches; as she says in "The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel's Ghostly Twin," "[a] critic is, at bottom, a judge, and judgment ought not to be tentative[.]" Yet it is this selfsame certainty which I found irritating in "The Boys in the Alley," perhaps because her judgment here is directed at me, the reader, as much as (if not more than) the literary critics who are her putative subject; that this essay is both the longest and one of the first in the book colored my perception of the book as a whole and diminished, to some extent, my enjoyment of the more traditional literary criticism found in the sections on "Fanatics" and "Monsters."What bothered me so much about "The Boys in the Alley" (who, by the way, are Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus) was Ozick's condescension toward the typical Goodreads reader, whose reviews she describes as contributing merely to "the skin of a genuine literary culture." She goes on in this vein:"Most customer reviewers, though clearly tough customers when it comes to awarding stars, are not tough enough - or well-read enough - for tragic realism or psychological complexity."Ouch. To the extent Ozick and her publisher intend for her book to sell to the non-literati, they exhibit an amazing amount of chutzpah in denigrating the very people who are most likely to buy it.Ozick is far from the first (or last, for that matter) person to raise this question: How knowledgeable and well-read must I be for my opinion of a particular work or author to "count," to be worthy of both public expression and public consideration? Ozick surely realizes that we are not all so fortunate as to be full-time readers; most of us are lucky to fit a couple of hours of reading around work and family responsibilities. She also acknowledges that "[t]he literary judgments even of novelists of consequence can be capricious," citing Virginia Woolf's dismissal of James Joyce and V.S. Naipaul's disdain for Henry James. If even such literary heavyweights as these can "get it wrong," why should Ozick so vociferously denounce most of us as "naive and unqualified [not to mention "insipid"] readers who look for easy prose and uplifting endings"? Don't get me wrong; I am no literary relativist. I agree with Ozick that "a critic is nothing without an authoritative posture, or standard." I believe that not all books are created equal; that we can, and should, recognize some books (the few) as "better than" others (the many); and that we need those, like Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, Michael Dirda, and Ozick herself, who can offer what most of us cannot: "horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intuitions." What I do suggest, however, is that readers are inherently suspicious of critics perceived to be elitist and that Ozick should remember that just because the current "climate of opinion" doesn't look like Trilling's doesn't necessarily mean that we have no "living literary consciousness" at all.Getting off my soapbox now, the more conventional critical essays comprising the remainder of the book are well worth reading, with Ozick providing some astute aphorisms, including my personal favorite:"Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings."I suggest that readers may appreciate this collection more if they save "The Boys in the Alley" for last.I received a free copy of Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.