Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover)

Cynthia Ozick, one of America's most celebrated novelists and critics, makes the case for serious literary criticism in this collection, which includes essays written especially for it. She opens with a provocative question: if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity, could the novel survive? From there she offers her own models of criticism, sorting writers into provocatively named groups (Critics, Figures, Monsters, Souls and Fanatics) and taking on Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Lionel Trilling, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, Harold Bloom, William Gass, Martin Amis and many more. Learned, witty and uncompromising, it's essential reading for anyone who cares about books and the future of literature. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. 224 pages.

Condition: Hardcover with dust jacket. The book itself is in very good condition. The dust jacket has scuffs and scratches, plus remnants of an incompletely removed label on the back that lifted the jacket's surface colour in some places.