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Ozick, Cynthia : The Din In The Head

Houghton Mifflin, New York City, NY, 2006

ISBN 0618470506

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 243 pages. The author's fifth collection of essays. One of Cynthia Ozick's finest achievements. 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 "The Din In The Head". Twenty essays by Cynthia Ozick. On subjects as diverse as Franz Kafka and Henry James (her two greatest mentor/idols), Helen Keller, Lionel Trilling, Sylvia Plath, Rudyard Kipling, and Leo Tolstoy, among others, demonstrating a breadth of learning and culture that no longer exists. She writes piercingly and critically, but always with an unself-conscious and un-indulgent sympathy for her subject, against her better judgment, and even while she is tearing him or her to shreds. The Foreword, "On Discord And Desire", presents the context in which the essays were written, a memorial tribute-of-sorts, deeply ambivalent, to Susan Sontag, with whom Ozick apparently quarreled in the lonely privacy of her writing room. For Ozick, Sontag was the dividing line/demarcation between The Old and The New in modern American culture, liberating and devastating at the same time (the title of Sontag's posthumous collection of essays, "At The Same Time", captures her still-controversial legacy from Sontag's own perspective). Sontag was the iconic, charismatic, and seductive champion of the life of the mind, who was also one of the central figures to undermine and even diminish it with her provocative and ardent championing of popular culture, "pure mind" on the one hand, "avid popularizer/fan" on the other. Unlike Sontag, Cynthia Ozick is an unapologetic mandarin, writing in three literary traditions simultaneously, all of them at the most profound level imaginable: The modern European, the ancient Jewish, and the Jamesian American. Hence, the dazzling allusiveness, poignant beauty, and sheer intensity of her work. Her prose style - imbricated, brachiate, and filigreed, to borrow three of her own favorite words - is a paradox: The rush of metaphors arrives at and realizes a work of luminous beauty. An absolute "must-have" title for Cynthia Ozick collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen on the title page by Cynthia Ozick. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. Her signature on this copy is one of the most beautiful we have ever seen. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still 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. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for "Fame & Folly". Finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 for "The Puttermesser Papers". Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for "Quarrel & Quandary". Recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. One of the greatest American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER CYNTHIA OZICK TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0618470506.

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