Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz; M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf; and many other subjects, including Dorothy Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Saul Bellow. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints is indispensable reading on the making of art—and the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.
  • FINALIST | 2007
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
© Joyce Ravid
Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she covers dance and books. She has also written for The New York Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the critical biography Mark Morris; Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder; and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She edited the unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky and, with Lynn Garafola, André Levinson on Dance. Acocella was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York. View titles by Joan Acocella
List of Illustrations
Introduction

A Fire in the Brain / Lucia Joyce
Blocked / Writer’s Block
True Confessions / Italo Svevo
Quicksand / Stefan Zweig
The Frog and the Crocodile / Simone de Beauvoir
Becoming the Emperor / Marguerite Yourcenar
A Hard Case / Primo Levi
European Dreams / Joseph Roth
The Neapolitan Finger / Andrea de Jorio
The Saintly Sinner / Mary Magdalene
After the Ball Was Over / Vaslav Nijinsky
Heroes and Hero Worship / Lincoln Kirstein
“Sweet as a Fig” / Frederick Ashton
American Dancer / Jerome Robbins
Second Act / Suzanne Farrell
The Soloist / Mikhail Baryshnikov
The Flame / Martha Graham
Dancing and the Dark / Bob Fosse
The Bottom Line / Twyla Tharp
On the Contrary / H. L. Mencken
After the Laughs / Dorothy Parker
Feasting on Life / M. F. K. Fisher
Finding Augie March / Saul Bellow
Piecework / Sybille Bedford
The Spider’s Web / Louise Bourgeois
Assassination on a Small Scale / Penelope Fitzgerald
The Hunger Artist / Susan Sontag
Counterlives / Philip Roth
Perfectly Frank / Frank O’Hara
Devil’s Work / Hilary Mantel
Burned Again / Joan of Arc

Acknowledgments

Textual Permissions
Index

About

Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz; M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf; and many other subjects, including Dorothy Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Saul Bellow. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints is indispensable reading on the making of art—and the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.

Awards

  • FINALIST | 2007
    National Book Critics Circle Awards

Author

© Joyce Ravid
Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she covers dance and books. She has also written for The New York Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the critical biography Mark Morris; Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder; and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She edited the unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky and, with Lynn Garafola, André Levinson on Dance. Acocella was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York. View titles by Joan Acocella

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction

A Fire in the Brain / Lucia Joyce
Blocked / Writer’s Block
True Confessions / Italo Svevo
Quicksand / Stefan Zweig
The Frog and the Crocodile / Simone de Beauvoir
Becoming the Emperor / Marguerite Yourcenar
A Hard Case / Primo Levi
European Dreams / Joseph Roth
The Neapolitan Finger / Andrea de Jorio
The Saintly Sinner / Mary Magdalene
After the Ball Was Over / Vaslav Nijinsky
Heroes and Hero Worship / Lincoln Kirstein
“Sweet as a Fig” / Frederick Ashton
American Dancer / Jerome Robbins
Second Act / Suzanne Farrell
The Soloist / Mikhail Baryshnikov
The Flame / Martha Graham
Dancing and the Dark / Bob Fosse
The Bottom Line / Twyla Tharp
On the Contrary / H. L. Mencken
After the Laughs / Dorothy Parker
Feasting on Life / M. F. K. Fisher
Finding Augie March / Saul Bellow
Piecework / Sybille Bedford
The Spider’s Web / Louise Bourgeois
Assassination on a Small Scale / Penelope Fitzgerald
The Hunger Artist / Susan Sontag
Counterlives / Philip Roth
Perfectly Frank / Frank O’Hara
Devil’s Work / Hilary Mantel
Burned Again / Joan of Arc

Acknowledgments

Textual Permissions
Index