As Prose implores: “Drop everything. Start reading. Now.”
An unabashed fan of reading recommends some of her favorite books.
The prolific literary critic, essayist, and novelist Prose (Mister Monkey, 2017, etc.) follows up Reading Like a Writer (2006) with an eclectic collection of previously published pieces that continue her clarion call for how books can “transport and entertain and teach us.” She sets the stage for the essays with “Ten Things that Art Can Do,” enthusiastically arguing that art is essential to life. She deftly mixes biography and critical analysis to demonstrate how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein challenges us “to ponder the profound issues raised by the monster and by the very fact of his existence.” Prose’s love of and fascination with Great Expectations, Cousin Bette, Middlemarch, Little Women, and New Grub Street, “so engrossing, so entertaining, so well made,” and Mansfield Park, “arguably the greatest of Austen’s novels,” will have readers anxious to revisit these classics. As a fine practitioner of the art of the short story, Prose feels a kind of “messianic zeal…to make sure that [Mavis] Gallant’s work continues to be read, admired—and loved.” Poet Mark Strand’s “remarkable” collection Mr. and Mrs. Baby offers us distant echoes of “the dark comedy of Kafka and Beckett, the lyrical imagination of Calvino and Schulz.” Prose also praises the work of Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bowles, Alice Munro, and Charles Baxter. She loves how Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, about refugees, can “alchemize the raw material of catastrophe into art.” Nonfiction is represented here too, as in Gitta Sereny’s “so controversial, so profoundly threatening” Cries Unheard, about an 11-year-old killer, or Diane Arbus’ Revelations, where the photographer “employed the grotesque as a staging ground in her quest for the transcendent.” My Struggle, the six-volume autobiographical work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, is “dense, complex, and brilliant.” Others discussed include Jennifer Egan, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edward St. Aubyn as well as Roberto Bolaño's 2666—"literary genius."
As Prose implores: “Drop everything. Start reading. Now.”Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-239786-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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