Art & ardor

Cynthia Ozick, the highly praised author of three collections of short stories, is equally admired as a literary critic and essayist. In this collection, the best of her critical work is brought together for the first time - brilliant, impassioned, often polemical essays that consider literature, politics, culture, language, and the myriad ways in which they affect and reflect each other.

Included here are two extraordinary extended essays: one on Edith Wharton, a model of the way one writer of notable fiction can grasp the essential truths about another; and one on Virginia Woolf, in which her relationship with Leonard Woolf is seen as having been both the sustenance of her genius and the shaping influence on his own life: "What he shored up against disintegration was the life he gained - a birthright he paid for by urging porridge between Virginia Woolf's resisting lips." There are a series of relentlessly acute discussions of several of Ozick's contemporaries: John Updike, I. B. Singer (his "phantasmagorical universe of ordeal and mutation and shock is, finally ...