Synopses & Reviews
Adam Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute...[a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani, ). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last eight years in the , , and elsewhere, Kirsch shows how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art. In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and life of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: "Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone." So shines literature, in these unflinchingly bold and provocative essays--as an illuminating, regenerative, and immortalizing force.
Review
"It is fashionable today to mourn the paucity of public intellectuals in America. Meet Adam Kirsch, one of the very best literary/cultural critics writing today--a critic in the grand tradition of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling. is a delight to read." Marjorie Perloff
Review
"Adam Kirsch is one of the best of our cultural and literary critics. Whether he is dispatching the repellent ideology of Slavoj Zizek or reappraising the literary legacy of E. M. Forster, he writes with stunning force and beautiful lucidity." New York Times Book Review
Review
""[Kirsch's] rare literary authority is on full display...It's a pleasure to be convoyed through Western literature by Kirsch, whose self-assuredness feels more like intellectual comfort than it does coercion." Alice Gregory
Review
"An adventurous critic and essayist of cascading impact... Kirsch's smart and piquant essays articulate reasons "to be grateful for literature," even as his whitewater title essay confronts us with the mad futility of our devotion to books." Janet Malcolm
Review
"Kirsch's writing is rarely overly zesty, it's lucid, forceful, and clear throughout--he doesn't wander, he walks." Donna Seaman Booklist
Review
"One of the excitements of reading Kirsch on poetry is the sense that he still holds out this quixotic ambition for the form, never mind the current fashion." Michael Andor Brodeur Boston Globe
Synopsis
Adam Kirsch has been described as elegant and astute... a] critic of the very first order (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last eight years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Kirsch shows how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art. In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and life of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone. So shines literature, in these unflinchingly bold and provocative essays--as an illuminating, regenerative, and immortalizing force.
Synopsis
A collection of essays from a "great poet-critic-intellectual" ().
Synopsis
In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last seven years in the , , and elsewhere, renowned American critic Adam Kirsch explores the intersection of literature with larger questions about ideas, history, and society. Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute . . . [a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani, ). In he examines the work and lives of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: "Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone." So, according to Kirsch, shines literature: as an unattainable speed, as a moving beacon.
About the Author
Adam Kirsch is the author of two collections of poems and several books of poetry criticism. A senior editor at the New Republic and a columnist for Tablet, he also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.