Product Description

From one of our most admired cultural critics (“A marvelous, canny writer”––Terry Castle, London Review of Books), thirty-one essays on some of the most influential artists of our time––writers, dancers, choreographers, sculptors––and two saints of all time, Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene. Among the people discussed: Italo Svevo, Stefan Zweig, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Joseph Roth, Vaslav Nijinsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth.

What unites the book is Acocella’s interest in the making of art and in the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.

Here is Acocella on Primo Levi, a chemist who, after the Nazis failed to kill him, wrote Survival in Auschwitz, the noblest of the camp memoirs, and followed it with twelve more books . . . Hilary Mantel, the aspiring young lawyer stuck on a couch with a chronic and debilitating illness, who asked herself, “What can one do on a couch?” (well, one could write) and went on to become one of England’s premier novelists . . . M. F. K. Fisher, who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated to her sister the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf . . . Marguerite Yourcenar, the victim of a ten-year writer’s block, who found in an old trunk a draft of a forgotten novel and finished the book: Memoirs of Hadrian . . . George Balanchine, who, after losing his family at age nine, survived the Russian Revolution, escaped from the Soviet Union at twenty, was for five years house choreographer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, came to the United States with the promise that he could set up a ballet company, and had to wait another fifteen years before being able to establish his extraordinary New York City Ballet . . . And Acocella on Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc reminds us that saints in the service of their visions–like artists in the creation of their art–draw power from the very blows of fortune that might be expected to defeat them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #607460 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-06
• Released on: 2007-02-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375424168
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Acocella is the New Yorker's dance critic, but dancers and choreographers comprise a minority of the artists featured in this elegant collection of writings mostly from the New Yorker. The dance pieces are literally the center of the book, sandwiched between Acocella's lucid assessments of writers (and one sculptor, Louise Bourgeois). She has a taste for early 20th-century European, often Jewish novelists who, she says, helped create the modern consciousness in literature: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, among others. In featuring these long-forgotten writers, she fulfills what, in a fascinating profile of Susan Sontag, she calls "an essential function of criticism: that of introducing readers to... strange work, things they wouldn't ordinarily encounter." A particularly affecting look at Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1998 portrays a man long in search of an artistic home who had to find that home, finally, within himself. The essays that follow the dance pieces focus largely on American and British writers (Bellow, Philip Roth, Sybille Bedford). Acocella can flatten a book she dislikes with cool derision ("The less she knows, the more she tells us," Acocella says of Carol Shloss's biography of Lucia Joyce), but her passionate and penetrating endorsements of other works make you want to discover their pleasures firsthand—the best service a critic can render. (Feb. 6)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Critic Acocella's deep knowledge of and organic feel for dance infuses her fleet-footed and witty prose. Like a dancer, she makes her art look easy, which it certainly is not, and what poise and range she evinces. Acocella has written expertly and vividly about dance for the New Yorker and other venues and is a keen literary critic as well. She has now collected 30 of her stellar artist profiles, electrifying portraits that seamlessly pair biography and criticism and draw authoritatively on psychology and history. Add to that Acocella's versatility and knack for choosing just the right individuals. Accompanied by superb photographs of the artists, Acocella's portraits bring into focus such complex figures as Lucia Joyce, James' mad dancing daughter; Mikhail Baryshnikov; Martha Graham; Bob Fosse; Marguerite Yourcenar; Dorothy Parker; Philip Roth; M. F. K. Fisher; and Susan Sontag; as well as the iconic Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc. How agile these firmly rooted yet whirling essays are, and how very enlightening. Acocella's portraits are so much fun to read, they feel like indulgences rather than writings that do no less than enrich and sustain culture. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“[An] elegant collection. [Acocella’s] passionate and penetrating endorsements of other works make you want to discover their pleasures firsthand–the best service a critic can render.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Critic Acocella’s deep knowledge of and organic feel for dance infuses her fleet-footed and witty prose. Like a dancer, she makes her art look easy, which it certainly is not, and what poise and range she evinces. She has now collected 30 of her stellar artist profiles, electrifying portraits that seamlessly pair biography and criticism and draw authoritatively on psychology and history. How agile these firmly rooted yet whirling essays are, and how very enlightening.”
–Booklist (starred review)

“So subtle, cogent, and pellucid are Joan Acocella's essays, so penetrating and direct, that each one is a revelation. And collected together they are testament to courage and persistence by a writer of tensile strength and sharp-eyed moral conviction. A pleasure from start to finish.”
–Brenda Wineapple, author of Hawthorne: A Life

“Joan Acocella's essays are more than a window into the heart of modern Europe. They are urgent and fresh bulletins written with the exquisite brilliance of a pen that is at once profound, uncompromising, and inspired. Joan Acocella doesn't just know Europe; she sees through it. She knows its ins and outs, spells out its genius, and as always brings luminous insights into a continent that continues to beckon, to mystify, and to elude.”
–André Aciman

“A hefty collection of profiles and essays centered around the question of what allows genius to flower in the face of often gargantuan difficulties. The galvanizing force in an artist’s success is tenacity, concludes critic Acocella . . . specifically “the ability to survive disappointment.” These 31 pieces–most originally appearing in The New Yorker, others from the New York Review of Books–reveal the author to be terrifically attracted to the underdog. Acocella’s obsessively detailed essays on dancers and choreographers are the book’s most enthralling. The emphasis here is on iconic lives, and these beautifully researched pieces provide riveting insights into the nature of creativity. Tight, intriguing and astute: Acocella is a critic with staying power.”
–Kirkus starred review

“Joan Acocella writes brilliantly about a lot of brilliant artistic creators and a couple of saints. She admires patience, tenacity, and courage. She appreciates candor, resilience, and imagination in the figures she so lovingly evokes, and these qualities also characterize her own work, which is not only lucid and insightful but also generous and even noble. She is one of our finest cultural critics.”
–Edward Hirsch

Customer Reviews

The creative life sympathetically examined
I have read a number of the essays in this collection and found them to be informative, insightful and at times, eye- opening. Acocella often chooses subjects who are not that well known , and who she feels have been neglected. Two of the novelists she writes about here, Joseph Roth and Hilary Mantel were little known to an American audience. But the essays I have read and very much enjoyed are those she has written on Stefan Zweig, and Saul Bellow. I also read with great interest her critical review of a biography on James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, one which Acocella feels makes exaggerated claims for Lucia's influence on her father's work. Another outstanding essay here is the one on Primo Levi who Acocella clearly believes is one of the great moral heroes of the century. Acocella has a real feeling for the struggles involved in the literary and artistic, the creative life. She often reveals a special kind of sympathy with her subject. And this is one of the things which makes her writing, to me anyway, so likeable. One feels the writer herself is a very understanding and considerate person, one whose own creative effort is diligent, caring, and intuitively wise.
I have not read all this collection but from what I have and know of the work of this writer I would recommend it strongly.

An inpiration to all creative people
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays.

This book is an inspiration to all creative people who have struggled with themselves and consequently their work. Better than any creative-self-help book, this brilliantly accomplished collection of essays, gives wonderful insights with amusing anecdotes into the live of artists. It is a study in problems that all artists face, whether they are writers, dancers, artists or saints.
About writing this book, the author says:" My concern is the pain that comes with the art-making, interfering with it, and how the artist deals with this......What allows the genius to flower is not neurosis, but its opposite, "ego strength", meaning amongst other things, ordinary Sunday- school virtues, such as tenacity, and above all the ability to survive disappointment."
Amongst the artists she discusses are; Stefan Zweig, Primo Levi, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bob Fosse, Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Roth, and Joan of Arc -an eclectic selection of gifted and talented people, who through their work, and our contact with them, have contributed in some way, to inspiring our lives.

Artistic Essays That Count
The essays on modern dance in America are particularly outstanding. Ms. Acocella writes with passion and knowledge. Many of her observations are succint yet sympathetic. They inform the book with a compassion for the individual artist's struggle to define his or her art; something not readily available in much of what passes for criticism these days. Her essay on Marguerite Yourcenar, the French writer who lived in Maine for much of her life, literally jumped off the page for me. No one who reads this book will be disappoited.