The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

Download or read book The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays written by Joan Acocella and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Yorker critic examines the books that reveal and record our world in a new essay collection. Joan Acocella, “one of our finest cultural critics” (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it has sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?” The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella’s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: “life and art.” In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella is our dream companion among its shelves. Includes 25 black-and-white images