The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

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Description

Joan Acocella, "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times, "Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have" Book Reports gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations, "Life and Art." In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.

Reviews

"Essayist Acocella shines in this splendid anthology of literary criticism . . . Smart and accessible, this is a blast." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"From Gilgamesh and Beowulf to Elmore Leonard and Richard Pryor, a brilliant critic unpacks centuries of artists and their works . . . [Acocella's ] wit and insight make anything worth reading about . . . A top-notch collection full of information, elegance, and humor." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"There are a handful of perfect foods, like yuba, which possess all the essential nutrients (Buddhist monks took it on their pilgrimages.) Rarer, perhaps, are perfect mind foods, like The Bloody Nightgown, whose essential nutrients--wit, depth, variety, beauty, humanity--could sustain you even on a desert island. With each rereading, these essays surprise and reward you anew." --Judith Thurman, author of A Left-Handed Woman

"Joan Acocella has always been one of our country's sharpest critics. She manages to write at the highest intellectual level and make it read like fun. This collection is endlessly entertaining. It also grapples with the central issues of art, literature and life." --T. M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real

Author Bio

Joan Acocella has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. She served as the magazine's dance critic from 1998 to 2019. Her books include Mark Morris, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and, most recently, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, a collection of essays. She coedited Andr Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties and edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the New York Institute for the Humanities, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the New York Book Critics Circle. She lives in New York.