Présentation de l'éditeur
“An absorbing achievement .º.º. A nimble, entertaining literary homage, but it is also, chillingly, what James would have called ‘the real thing.’”—New York Times Book Review
Cynthia Ozick is a literary treasure. In her sixth novel, she retraces Henry James’s The Ambassadors and delivers a brilliant, utterly new American classic.
At the center of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to travel to Europe to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of his family. Over the course of a few months she travels from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, and finally facing her ex-husband to shake off his lingering sneers from decades past. As she inadvertently wreaks havoc in their lives, every one of them is irrevocably changed. “Raucous, funny, ferocious, and tragic. A literary master, as James was, Ozick makes all those qualities fit together seamlessly, and with heartbreaking effect.”—Philadelphia Inquirer “Dazzling, even masterful.”—Entertainment Weekly
Revue de presse
For
Dictation:
There are many reasons to admire Cynthia Ozick's fiction...
Dictation shows that Ozick continues to command her usual mastery of voices and tones...you can take
Dictation wherever you go. You'll want to, since it'll be hard to stop reading once you start." --
Washington Post Book World
"It's typical Ozick, by which I mean typically splendid: The comic moroseness gaines in power until the comedy has turned inside out, and you're gazing at tragedy." --
Bloomberg News
"Cynthia Ozick is double-barreled. She's an inventive and revelatory fiction writer and an exacting, battle-ready critic; an impish writer of conscience and a creative intellectual. In this quartet of long stories, a supple form well-suited to Ozick's wit and insight, she pursues her fascination with opposites and parallels, and she extends her inquiry into how language can be both liberating and oppressive." ---
Los Angeles Times Book Review
For
Heir to the Glimmering World:
"In language aglow with fierce wit and passionate intensity, Ms. Ozick summons up the plight not only of this particular set of wandering souls but of others, past and present, subject to the ravages of time and circumstance, the upheavals of history. Lavish in invention and ideas, yet superbly controlled as a work of narrative art, 'Heir to the Glimmering World' has all the hallmarks of a permanent work of literature." --
Wall Street Journal
" . . . a very good story . . . One of the strengths of this new novel is its portrayal of minor characters . . . They have all the familiar lineaments of the real, in the enduring tradition of moral realism."-
USA Today
"Wise, muscular prose . . . Ozick's writing is strong and seductive, infused with wit and a sense of history that never burdens the text but never leaves it either." --
O
For The Din in the Head:
"Gives her readers exactly what they've come to expect . . . an unabashed intellectual hunger, a passion for language, a fierce insistence that writers have the right to explore whatever imaginative terrain their talents and impulses urge them toward. And, of course, Ozick wouldn't be Ozick without an occasional outburst of impatience with fools." -- Seattle Times
"Ozick is our arch defender of the independent rights and powers of literature, and of the novel in particular. . . Open the collection anywhere -- I guarantee it -- and you will feel the bite of her distinctive voice. If you are a reviewer, you will want to quote her." --
Sven Birkerts, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The passion that fills these essays is invigorating. In our age of irony and commercial pandering, we need writers like Ozick, who have the real beliefs and are willing
