Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

Originally published in places like the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, PEN Magazine, the Paris Review Online, Standpoint (UK), and Harper’s, this collection - which includes new essays written explicitly for this volume - Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, showcases the writings of one of America's sharpest literary minds. Now 88, she represents a long-vanished age of literary criticism.

If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared — if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity — could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age.

“I’d intended to provoke; what I got instead was sixty reviews in a vacuum.” Jonathan Franzen said this after penning a little-known manifesto, before he published The Corrections, spurned Oprah’s book club, and got into a high-profile slap fight with Jonathan Safran Foer. The Franzer-Foer spat was over the general decline in readership in America. Thus begins Cynthia Ozick’s lacerating essay “The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin."