SIGHT-READINGS: AMERICAN FICTIONS - Rare Fine Association Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed And Inscribed by Elizabeth Hardwick - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE

Hardwick, Elizabeth (Author); Didion, Joan; Roth, Philip; Updike, John & Other Writer-Subjects

ISBN 10: 0375501274 / ISBN 13: 9780375501272

Edité par New York City, NY: Random House, 1998, 1998

A propos de cet article

1st Printing. Signed. 284 pages. Published in 1998. The author's fourth collection of essays. One of Elizabeth Hardwick's finest achievements. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the softcover "original" called "American Fictions". Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. Presents Elizabeth Hardwick's "Sight-Readings: American Fictions". Gathers, in one elegant and generous volume, her magisterial essays on such canonical figures as Margaret Fuller and Gertrude Stein as well as her near-canonical coevals in John Updike, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Richard Ford. "Elizabeth Hardwick stands first among America's most significant literary essayists, and she is surely the most surprising" (Cynthia Ozick). It should be added that very few of America's serious critics have as broad, deep, and rich an erudition on the country's literary heritage as Hardwick did. As such, she was the generalist par excellence, an anomaly in our present time of academic specialists, who know everything about one small thing, and nothing else. Alfred Kazin saw a spiritual, almost mystical grandeur to American literature, which he sought to capture in his procession of books. Elizabeth Hardwick was more interested in - more committed to - the specifics, the minutiae, nuances, modulations, and subtleties that define and set apart the writers she considered. It was hard to expect, for example, that Kazin, a passionate (and truly great) Jewish-American moralist, would have much use for Vladimir Nabokov. Whereas Hardwick once famously described him as a quintessentially American writer. An absolute "must-have" title for Elizabeth Hardwick collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed and inscribed in black ink-pen on the front free endpaper by the author: "To - With the good wishes of Elizabeth Hardwick". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. The recipient, who is named, is an important American public figure, and cannot be named here. This title is a great collection. As far as we know, this is the only such signed and inscribed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare signed copy thus. One of the greatest writers of the 20th century. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ELIZABETH HARDWICK TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0375501274.

N° de réf. du vendeur 24031

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: SIGHT-READINGS: AMERICAN FICTIONS - Rare Fine Association Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed And Inscribed by Elizabeth Hardwick - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE
• Éditeur: New York City, NY: Random House, 1998
• Date de parution: 1998
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0375501274
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780375501272
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: 1st Edition.
• État de l'article: Fine
• État de la jaquette: Fine
• Signé: Signed by Author

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Book by Hardwick Elizabeth

Présentation de l'éditeur

It is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life," wrote Henry James, "that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one's morality." Newness and rootedness are the twin poles of Sight-Readings, Elizabeth Hardwick's brilliant new collection of essays. (Her first, Seduction and Betrayal, was nominated for the National Book Award.) Hardwick's focus here is on American writers, at home and abroad, and especially women, as writers and as characters: Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion, among others.
        In sections on Old New York, Americans Abroad, and Fictions of America, Hardwick considers writers and their landscapes, real and imagined. Her essays on Edith Wharton and Henry James illuminate aspects of their inventions of New York. From there she takes us to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, into the hermetic world of Boston Transcendentalism, and on to the suburbs of John Cheever, the America of Philip Roth and John Updike, and the restless expanses of Richard Ford and the Prairie poets.
        Elizabeth Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant criticism. Her essays on American writers are them-selves a work of literature.