From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes this collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art's contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.
"If there is such a thing as a literary pantheon in America, then Cynthia Ozick is surely its Athena . . . Ozick casts sentences that fairly pulse with the electricity of a highly charged mind."
Washington Post
"As an essayist, Cynthia Ozick is a very good storyteller. Her arguments are plots . . . They twist and turn, digress, slow down and speed up, surprise with sudden illuminations."
New York Times Book Review
"Cynthia Ozick is double-barreled. She's an inventive and revelatory fiction writer and an exacting, battle-ready critic### an impish writer of conscience and a creative intellectual."
