Bøger af Cynthia Ozick

Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as "Who Owns Anne Frank?," "What Helen Keller Saw," "Dostoevsky's Unabomber," and "Transcending the Kafkaesque," Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including "A Hebrew Sibyl," "What Happened to the Baby?," "Dictation," "The Biographer's Hat," and "The Conversion of the Jews," Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth.

Four stories of comedy, deception, and revenge, including one previously unpublished, from the acclaimed author of Heir to the Glimmering World. Cynthia Ozick's new work of fiction brings together four long stories that showcase this incomparable writer's sly humor and piercing insight into the human heart. Each starts in the comic mode, with heroes who suffer from willful self-deceit. These not-so-innocents proceed from self-deception to deceiving others, who do not take it lightly. Revenge is the consequence -- and for the reader, a delicious, if dark, recognition of emotional truth. The glorious new novella "Dictation" imagines a fateful meeting between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of their fame. Timid Miss Hallowes, who types for Conrad, comes under the influence of James's Miss Bosanquet, high-spirited, flirtatious, and scheming. In a masterstroke of genius, Ozick hatches a plot between them to insert themselves into posterity. Ozick is at her most devious, delightful best in these four works, illuminating the ease with which comedy can glide into calamity.

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 her first erotic desires. But just as he begins to return her affection, his lover, a radical socialist named Ninel (Lenin spelled backward), turns her out. And so Rosie takes refuge from love among refugees of world upheaval. Cast out from Berlin's elite, the Mitwissers live at the whim of a mysterious benefactor, James A'Bair. Professor Mitwisser is a terrifying figure, obsessed with his arcane research. His distraught wife, Elsa, once a prominent physicist, is becoming unhinged. Their willful sixteen-year-old daughter runs the household: the exquisite, enigmatic Anneliese. Rosie's place here is uncertain, and she finds her fate hanging on the arrival of James. Inspired by the real Christopher Robin, James is the Bear Boy, the son of a famous children's author who recreated James as the fanciful subject of his books. Also a kind of refugee, James runs from his own fame, a boy adored by the world but grown into a bitter man. It is Anneliese's fierce longing that draws James back to this troubled house, and it is Rosie who must help them all resist James's reckless orbit. Ozick lovingly evokes these perpetual outsiders thrown together by surprising chance. The hard times they inherit still hold glimmers of past hopes and future dreams. Heir to the Glimmering World is a generous delight.

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.

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. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. "The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle"Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times"A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review

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.

A devastating vision of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness it left in the lives of those who passed through it.

From 'one of the greatest fiction writers and critics alive today' (The New York Times), a new novella about memory and ageing

Masterly collection of short stories by an American novelist at the height of her powers

A mischievous story inspired by the real-life Christopher Robin by one of the most distinctive voices in American literature

Fierce, concentrated, and brutal, The Shawl burns itself into the reader's imagination with almost surreal power' The New York TimesConsider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. In the middle of winter, weak and starving, Rosa marches to a Nazi concentration camp. She clutches her baby to her chest, wrapped in a shawl. Later Rosa will stuff the shawl into her mouth to stop herself from screaming out at the horrific event she must witness. Thirty years later, in a summer without end, Rosa is in Miami. Her anger and grief have become her dementia and her sustenance, and a shawl conjures the spirit of her murdered child. A modern classic and a masterpiece in both acts, The Shawl succeeds in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness of its aftermath.

A selection of essays by the acclaimed and beloved writer Cynthia Ozick, collected by David Miller.

Overflowing with ideas, spiked with wit and humanity, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of America's most visionary novelists

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, Foreign Bodies is a dazzling and profound exploration of the human face of the central relationship in the last century: that between the old world and the new.