Collected Essays

The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller

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Of course, every writer here is an essayist—I use the term here only for Joni Tevis because she practices the form in its most contemporary, artful sense. This style confronts the reader with its form, as it makes them wonder how the parts will all fit together and look for it as they read. And certain recurring images like the atomic test sites and the tourists who visited to watch the explosions give the sections unity but also feel a bit redundant.

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Tevis has an uncanny eye for unexpected details. The ersatz houses and poignantly placed mannequins of Doom Town, the village constructed to be blown up in the desert in the 50s, are made out of material from all over the US, a fact which Tevis renders like this: You probably remember Stanley Fish from your college freshmen English course. In his latest book, Think Again , Fish expands his scope from literature to damn-near everything under the sun. This would be a poor way to participate in democracy, yes, but this is not at all what anyone does. But mostly, Think Again is the work of a formidable intelligence with an easygoing style, readable and accessible and thoughtful and frequently illuminating.

Like John Lahr, Edward Mendelson embarks, in Moral Agents , in a similarly Johnsonian enterprise, albeit a decidedly less ambitious one—a mere eight writers.

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His previous book, The Things That Matter , focused on seven novels by women; here his subjects are all men: The result of a series he wrote for The New York Review of Books , the essays in Moral Agents are immensely readable and edifying, if not always revelatory. The chapter on Alfred Kazin is especially good. As history it tells the unique story of a single book, author, or era; as aphorism it offers a general principle through which to understand any multitude of books, authors, and eras.

The greatest critics—from Samuel Johnson through Virginia Woolf, William Empson, and beyond—could combine history and aphorism because each had a cohesive ethical vision that made sense of the connections between persons and general principles, and between literature and life.

Lionel Trilling and Saul Bellow and W. Auden, et al, were unique and powerful creative forces, but they typify an anachronistic archetype—the singular artist as hero, as father, as moral guidance—no matter what they each thought of themselves. Mendelson is a fantastic writer and critic, and I recommend Moral Agents wholeheartedly, especially on a piece-by-piece basis, though I think a more accurate title, considering the ethical bait-and-switch some of them pulled on their dedicated readers, would be Moral Double Agents.

The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick | Book review

They have their lots surveyed. Here the property begins and there it ends.

A conservative instinct in them—which every lover of order will recognize and respect—resists extension, calls for limits. It tickles one so in the self-esteem. By , however, Bellow succumbed to the oft-heard and, to my mind, much-disproven idea that technology has overcome interpersonal dynamics and general creative interest.

His essays on other writers—Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, Shakespeare—are among his finest, as are some of the beautiful meditations on place—especially, obviously, Chicago, but also Madrid, Paris, and Vermont—which evoke these geographies as well as any novel. It is a fine collection for anyone interested in Bellow but also, less overtly, the progress of American fiction since WWII.

To this I would add as an addendum an additional consequence, no less tragic: Now, at 82, Vendler presents The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar , a remarkable collection of essays on poetry. But add in astute pieces on Allen Ginsberg, T. Just read Helen Vendler.

Along with Helen Vendler, Christopher Hitchens shares the distinction of being the best writer on this list. If Lahr and Mendelson attempt Johnsonian feats, Hitchens may as well be his reincarnation. Like the great Doctor, Hitchens could be, among other things, misogynistic, condescending, pedantic, hyperbolic, and crass. She begins by acknowledging the New England freshness: A horrifying clutter screams through the lonely air.

Collected Essays, by George Orwell

And so it does, in these marvellous essays — many of them notices of new books, although one would never think of calling them book reviews, so broad in range are they, and so profound in their critical discriminations. Nor are they in any way dated.

Hardwick, who had a deep admiration for Hannah Arendt , grants autonomy to art but not to aesthetics. Ironically, however, it was Hardwick, and a few others of an equal talent, who kept, and still keep, the drama going. Topics Essays Book of the day.

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick review – sublime critical insights

Anderson, Millay, and Crane in Their Letters 3. An American Hero 4. The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead 6. Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries 7. America and Dylan Thomas The Subjection of Women Uncollected Stories of Faulkner Meeting VS Naipaul Robert Frost in His Letters Thomas Mann at Wives and Mistresses Bartleby in Manhattan The Sense of the Present English Visitors in America Letters of Delmore Schwartz Wharton in New York

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