Description
Joan Acocella has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm.
The Bloodied 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 translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling in the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds.
The New Yorker critic examines the books that reveal and record our world in a new essay collection. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.
Endorsements
“one of our finest cultural critics” — Edward Hirsch
“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?” — Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times