FAME & FOLLY: ESSAYS

New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. Fine/Fine Dust Jacket.. New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Edition/First Printing. 289 pages. The author's third collection of essays. Now considered a late-modern classic. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Cynthia Ozick's "Fame & Folly: Essays". Seventeen essays that offer more ample proof, if proof were ever needed, that the author is not only a fine novelist and short-story writer, but also one of America's finest literary critics. Includes essays on T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Isaac Babel, Mark Twain, George Steiner, Saul Bellow, and Salman Rushdie, among others. An Ozick essay is always cause for celebration. She writes piercingly and critically but always with an unself-conscious and unindulgent sympathy for her subject, against her better judgment, and even while she is tearing him or her to shreds. Her mastery of the essay form is something that very few writers can command and most other writers can only envy. She is writing in three literary traditions simultaneously, all of them at the most profound level imaginable: The ancient Jewish, the modern European, and the Jamesian American. Hence, the dazzling allusiveness, poignant beauty, and sheer intensity of her work. Her prose style - imbricated, brachiate, and filigreed, to borrow three of her own favorite words - is a paradox: The rush of metaphors arrives at and realizes a work of luminous beauty. An absolute "must-have" title for Cynthia Ozick collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Cynthia Ozick. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a late-modern classic. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. Finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 for "The Puttermesser Papers". Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for "Quarrel & Quandary". Recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. One of the greatest writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER CYNTHIA OZICK TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) . ISBN 0679446907.