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In a Yellow Wood

In a Yellow Wood

Selected Stories and Essays

Summary

Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” “What Helen Keller Saw,” “Dostoevsky’s Unabomber,” and “Transcending the Kafkaesque,” Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including “A Hebrew Sibyl,” “What Happened to the Baby?,” “Dictation,” “The Biographer’s Hat,” and “The Conversion of the Jews,” Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth.

Reviews

  • 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.
    The Washington Post

About the author

Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has won various prizes and awards for her novels, short stories, poems and essays. Her books include The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, Bloodshed and Three Novellas, Trust (a novel), The Messiah of Stockholm (a novel), The Shawl (a novella and story), Art & Ardor (essays) and Metaphor & Memory (essays). What Henry James Knew, her most recent collection of essays, is a companion volume to Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character. Her work has been translated into most major languages.
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