Oates brings together thirty-seven diverse and provocative pieces from The New York Review ofBooks, The Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review. Through these balanced and illuminating essays, we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears andcontemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process.
"The pervasive suspicion that serious reading is becoming a marginal pursuit contributes to the anxious, timid, supportive tone of what passes for literary criticism these days, and the timorousness of the enterprise is part of what makes Oates's robust, painstaking, and self-assured essays both exemplary and somewhat anomalous.
Oates brings together thirty-seven diverse and provocative pieces from The New York Review ofBooks, The Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review. Through these balanced and illuminating essays, we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears andcontemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process.
"The pervasive suspicion that serious reading is becoming a marginal pursuit contributes to the anxious, timid, supportive tone of what passes for literary criticism these days, and the timorousness of the enterprise is part of what makes Oates's robust, painstaking, and self-assured essays both exemplary and somewhat anomalous.
