The New Yorker critic examines the books that reveal and record our world in a new essay collection.
Joan Acocella, -one of our finest cultural critics- (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it has sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, -Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?-
The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella-s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: -life and art.- In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien-s tra
