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Acocella, Joan : Twenty-eight Artists And Two Saints: Essays

Pantheon Books, New York City, NY, 2007

ISBN 0375424164

First Edition / First Printing. As New in As New Dust Jacket. 524 pages. Retrospective collection of essays. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Joan Acocella's "Twenty-Eight Artists And Two Saints". Thirty-one full-length essays by the resident dance critic and essayist/contributor of The New Yorker Magazine. The title is an allusion/tribute to Virgil Thomson's great opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts". By now, it should be obvious that Acocella is the finest dance critic right now since Arlene Croce retired and Edwin Denby died. She will probably be regarded as the third member of just such a triumvirate. What sets her apart from her great predecessors is that Joan Acocella has also written about literature, the visual arts, and as the title suggests, even iconic religious figures. "Acocella's deep knowledge of dance infuses her fleet-footed and witty prose. Like a dancer, she makes her art look easy, which it certainly is not, and what poise and range she evinces. Accompanied by superb photographs of the artists, Acocella's portraits bring into focus such complex figures as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, Marguerite Yourcenar, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, M. F. K. Fisher, and Susan Sontag as well as Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc. So much fun to read, they feel like indulgences rather than writings that do no less than enrich and sustain culture" (Donna Seaman). In her essay on the tough-minded yet at the same time, surprisingly vulnerable Sontag, Acocella writes that an essential function of criticism is "that of introducing readers to strange work, things they wouldn't ordinarily encounter". Loyal readers of The New Yorker Magazine can quote many of Acocella's one-liners from memory, and here is just one of them: "The less she knows, the more she tells us" (on the Stanford scholar Carol Shloss and her dreary feminist biography of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter, who aspired to be a great dancer). Two of Joan Acocella's previous books are the best of their kind: A book-length account on Willa Cather and the first biography on Mark Morris. Here is her debut collection of essays, a great critic's inexhaustible and indispensable writings on the experience called ecstasy, which Vladimir Nabokov once described as the aim of all art. An absolute "must-have" title for Joan Acocella collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen on the title page by Joan Acocella. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. One of the most brilliant American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER JOAN ACOCELLA TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0375424164.

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