"What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow's eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow's vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it." -Chicago Sun-Times

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: He is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting...

Quarrel & Quandary showcases the manifold talents of one of our leading and award-winning critics and essayists.
In nineteen opulent essays, Cynthia Ozick probes Dostoevsky for insights into the Unabomber, questions the role of the public intellectual, and dares to wonder what poetry is. She roams effortlessly from Kafka to James, Styron to Stein, and, in the book's most famous essay, dissects the gaudy commercialism that has reduced Anne Frank to -usable goods.- Courageous, audacious, and sublime, these essays have the courage of conviction, the probing of genius, and the...

Washington Square follows the coming-of-age of its plain-faced, kindhearted heroine, Catherine Sloper. Much to her father's vexation, a handsome opportunist named Morris Townsend woos the long-suffering heiress, intent on claiming her fortune. When Catherine stubbornly refuses to call off her engagement, Dr. Sloper forces Catherine to choose between her inheritance and the only man she will ever truly love. Cynthia Ozick, in her Introduction to what she calls Henry James's "most American fiction," writes that "every line, every paragraph, every chapter of Washington Square] is...

A small group of Jews weave a web of intrigue and fantasy around a book reviewer's contention that he is the son of Borus Schultz, the legendary Polish writer killed by the Nazis before his magnum opus, THE MESSIAH, could be brought to light.

Money and conscience are at the heart of Cynthia Ozick's masterly first novel, narrated by a nameless young woman and set in the private world of wealthy New York, the dire landscape of postwar Europe, and the mythical groves of a Shakespearean isle. Beginning in the 1930s and extending through four decades, Trust is an epic tale of the narrator's quest for her elusive father, a scandalous figure whom she has never known. In a provocative afterword, Ozick reflects on how she came to write the novel and discusses the cultural shift in the nature of literary ambition in the years since.

Cynthia Ozick is an American master at the height of her powers in Heir to the Glimmering World, a grand romantic novel of desire, fame, fanaticism, and unimaginable reversals of fortune. Ozick takes us to the outskirts of the Bronx in the 1930s, as New York fills with Europe's ousted dreamers, turned overnight into refugees.
Rose Meadows unknowingly enters this world when she answers an ambiguous want ad for an "assistant" to a Herr Mitwisser, the patriarch of a large, chaotic household. Rosie, orphaned at eighteen, has been living with her distant relative Bertram, who sparks...

One of Americas foremost novelists and critics focuses on the essential joys of great literature, with particular emphasis on the novel. With razor-sharp wit, she investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and more.

From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes a new collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art's contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.

With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality."

Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem....

This 1862 novel, in a vibrant new translation by Peter Constantine, is Tolstoy's semiautobiographical story of young Olenin, a wealthy, disaffected Muscovite who joins the Russian army and travels to the untamed frontier of the Caucasus in search of a more authentic life. While striving to adopt the rough and ready lifestyle of the local Cossacks, Olenin falls in love with a free-spirited girl whose fiance turns out to be a formidable opponent. Showcasing the philosophical insight that would characterize Tolstoy's later masterpieces, this long overdue translation is a revelation.