The collected essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick

Book - 2017

"Collection of Elizabeth Hardwick's essays"--

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Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
New York : New York Review Books [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Elizabeth Hardwick (author)
Physical Description
xix, 610 pages ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781681371542
  • Machine generated contents note: To the Point: Selected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
  • PROPOSED TABLE OF CONTENTS
  • NOT FINAL
  • 1. The Decline of Book Reviewing
  • 2. Anderson, Millay, and Crane in Their Letters
  • 3. William James: An American Hero
  • 4. Mary McCarthy
  • 5. The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead
  • 6. Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries
  • 7. George Eliot's Husband
  • 8. Loveless Love: Graham Greene
  • 9. America and Dylan Thomas
  • 10. The Subjection of Women
  • 11. Simone Weill
  • 12. Uncollected Stories of Faulkner
  • 13. Meeting VS Naipaul
  • 14. Ring Lardner
  • 15. Robert Frost in His Letters
  • 16. Domestic Manners
  • 17. Thomas Mann at 100
  • 18. Wives and Mistresses
  • 19. Nabokov: Master Class
  • 20. Bartleby in Manhattan
  • 21. The Sense of the Present
  • 22. Fiction
  • 23. English Visitors in America
  • 24. Letters of Delmore Schwartz
  • 25. Mrs. Wharton in New York
  • 26. On Washington Square
  • 27. The Genius of Margaret Fuller
  • 28. Gertrude Stein
  • 29. Djuna Barnes: The Fate of the Gifted
  • 30. Katherine Anne Porter
  • 31. Wind from the Prairie (Masters, Sandburg,)
  • 32. Edmund Wilson
  • 33. Norman Mailer: The Teller and the Tape
  • 34. Mary McCarthy in New York
  • 35. The Magical Prose of Poets: Elizabeth Bishop
  • 36. Tru Confessions (Capote)
  • 37. Melville: Redburn
  • 38. Thomas Wolfe
  • 39. Sinclair Lewis
  • 40. Nathaniel West
  • 41. Henry James
  • 42. Tess Slesinger
  • 43. Schhedrin
  • 44. Boston
  • 45. After Watts
  • 46. Selma
  • 47. The Emigre.
Review by New York Times Review

LIONESS: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, by Francine Klagsbrun. (Schocken, $40.) Meir has often been as reviled in Israel as she is admired in the United States, but perspectives are shifting. Klagsbrun's absorbing biography suggests this woman politician made history in more ways than one. AN ODYSSEY: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, by Daniel Mendelsohn. (Knopf, $26.95.) A distinguished critic and classicist, Mendelsohn uses Homer's epic as a vehicle for telling his own intricately constructed story of a father and son and their travails through life and love. PRESIDENT MCKINLEY: Architect of the American Century, by Robert W. Merry. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) McKinley tends to be forgotten among American presidents, overshadowed by his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, but he was largely responsible for America's 20th-century role in the world. Merry's measured, insightful biography seeks to set the record straight. THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK, edited by Darryl Pinckney. (New York Review, paper, $19.95.) These impeccably economical essays, collected here with a wise introduction by Pinckney, offer a rich immersion in Hardwick's brilliant mind and the minds of the writers she read so well. NOMADLAND: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder. (Norton, $26.95.) In this brilliant and compassionate book, Bruder documents how a growing number of older people, post-recession refugees from the middle and working class, cross the land in their vans and R.V.s in search of work. THE SHADOW DISTRICT, by Arnaldur Indridason. (Thomas Dunne/ Minotaur, $25.99.) In this moody Icelandic mystery, a retired police officer investigates a present-day murder with apparent links to another crime, committed during the waning days of World War II, when the neutral nation was occupied by Allied troops. A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford. (The Experiment, $25.95.) With a heady amalgam of science, history and a bit of anthropology, Rutherford offers a captivating primer on genetics and human evolution as told through our DNA. THE LAST BALLAD, by Wiley Cash. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Cash's novel revisits a 1929 textile union strike that turned deadly; his heroine is based on a real-life union organizer and folk singer now mostly lost to history. CATAPULT: Stories, by Emily Fridlund. (Sarabande, paper, $16.95.) This powerhouse of a first collection - by an author whose debut novel, "History of Wolves," was a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize - is notable for its deft mix of humor and insight. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This fine, revealing career retrospective showcases the late Hardwick, a novelist and cofounder of the New York Review of Books, honing her favorite form, the literary review, to razor-sharp precision. Pinckney, her onetime student, has chosen certain essays, notably reflections on the civil rights era, to illustrate her work as a journalist; other pieces are meditations on place, both close to home (Maine) and far away (Brazil). But the bulk and best of the selections are considerations of literary greats, including Elizabeth Bishop, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edith Wharton. Reading straight through the chronologically ordered collection demonstrates Hardwick's development as an essayist. The early essays are witty, arch, and detached, attempts by an urban sophisticate at remaining unseduced by cultural trends such as new journalism. As Hardwick matures, her confident declarations begin to ring truer, her impressive grasp of the literary canon seems more thoughtful and less ornamental, and her insights grow in accuracy, humor, and heart. Curiously, while carefully and beautifully crafted, Hardwick's essays read more like accumulations of beautiful sentences than cohesive wholes, and rarely add up to a lasting impression. Nevertheless, this book contains ample examples of literary criticism that might be imitated or even matched but not surpassed in its style, insight, and genuine love for literature. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Hardwick's (1916-2007) literary reputation as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist, which may have been briefly overshadowed in the last years of her life by the multiple biographies (where she was often alluded to for her marriage to Robert Lowell and her relationships with other writers), should be revisited and reconsidered for her contributions to the world of letters. This collection, edited and with an introduction by her former student Pinckney, is significant. Hardwick, who was a cofounder, editor, and advisor to the New York Review of Books, covered the important events of her time (the civil rights and women's movements, protests against the Vietnam War) with clarity and precision and without sentimentality. Her ear for language and eye for detail, i.e., her novelist's sensibility (she published three), makes her sketches and essays a pleasure to read and savor. Pinckney's introduction offers insights into Hardwick's keen intelligence and quick wit. VERDICT This wonderful volume of essays about place and time is recommended for libraries with large literature and women's studies collections.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A career-spanning collection of essays, reviews, criticism, and more from a co-founder of the New York Review of Books.As a novelist and co-founder of the immensely influential (and still-running) NYRB, Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) lived at the center of midcentury public intellectual life in America. (She was even married to poet Robert Lowell.) Throughout her six-decade career, Hardwick was devoted to pursuing literature as a way of life and finding life in literature. A quintessential "writer's writer," her essays are not academic in style, but neither do they pander to broad public interest or themes. Instead, she writes with a clear, concise voice that is simultaneously accessible and erudite. At the heart of Hardwick's oeuvre is a study of literature and writers that includes essays on her contemporaries Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Philip Roth, among others, as well as historical studies of American luminaries Herman Melville, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Perhaps the most relevant essay among the collection is the opening lamentation "The Decline of Book Reviewing." Written in 1959 for Harper's, the essay criticizes popular book critics and reviews their soft and moderate tone: "Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory." The sentiment captured by the essay could easily be used as a stand-in for the current climate of book culture, which prizes the market and pleasure of reading to such an infantilizing extent that criticism is nearly obsolete. Contextualized with an introduction by longtime NYRB contributor and author Darryl Pinckney (Black Deutschland, 2016, etc.), who was a creative writing student of Hardwick's, the essays collected in this volume represent a vital entry point to American literature and culture. An essential compendium of midcentury American intellectual life, one that reaffirms the personal and cultural importance of literature. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.