Synopses & Reviews
From one of our most admired cultural critics ("A marvelous, canny writer"
Terry Castle, London Review of Books), 31 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 12 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 10-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 20, 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 15 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.
Review
"Acocella's obsessively detailed essays on dancers and choreographers are the book's most enthralling." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Critic Acocella's deep knowledge of and organic feel for dance infuses her fleet-footed and witty prose....How agile these firmly rooted yet whirling essays are, and how very enlightening." Booklist
Synopsis
A distinguished cultural critic presents an insightful compilation of thirty-one essays in which she reflects on the life and work--and the creative process involved--of Simone de Beauvoir, Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins, Susan Sontag, Bob Fosse, Philip Roth, and other influential artists, writers, and saints Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene. 12,500 first printing.
About the Author
Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she covers dance and books. She has also written for The New York Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the critical biography Mark Morris; Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder; and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She edited the unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky and, with Lynn Garafola, André Levinson on Dance. Acocella was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction
A Fire in the Brain / Lucia Joyce
Blocked / Writers Block
True Confessions / Italo Svevo
Quicksand / Stefan Zweig
The Frog and the Crocodile / Simone de Beauvoir
Becoming the Emperor / Marguerite Yourcenar
A Hard Case / Primo Levi
European Dreams / Joseph Roth
The Neapolitan Finger / Andrea de Jorio
The Saintly Sinner / Mary Magdalene
After the Ball Was Over / Vaslav Nijinsky
Heroes and Hero Worship / Lincoln Kirstein
“Sweet as a Fig” / Frederick Ashton
American Dancer / Jerome Robbins
Second Act / Suzanne Farrell
The Soloist / Mikhail Baryshnikov
The Flame / Martha Graham
Dancing and the Dark / Bob Fosse
The Bottom Line / Twyla Tharp
On the Contrary / H. L. Mencken
After the Laughs / Dorothy Parker
Feasting on Life / M. F. K. Fisher
Finding Augie March / Saul Bellow
Piecework / Sybille Bedford
The Spiders Web / Louise Bourgeois
Assassination on a Small Scale / Penelope Fitzgerald
The Hunger Artist / Susan Sontag
Counterlives / Philip Roth
Perfectly Frank / Frank OHara
Devils Work / Hilary Mantel
Burned Again / Joan of Arc
Acknowledgments