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Ozick, Cynthia : The Messiah Of Stockholm

Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, NY, 1987

ISBN 0394547012

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 144 pages. The author's second novel. One of the finest American novels of the 20th century. 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 Cynthia Ozick's "The Messiah of Stockholm". Her novel-homage to Bruno Schulz and to Philip Roth, one of Schulz's most ardent champions in English, and to whom the novel is dedicated. For a very long time, literary scholars and Holocaust historians believed that Schulz left behind the manuscript of a novel, "The Messiah". Alas and if so, it has never been found. Disappointed yet inspired, Ozick imagines it turning up in Stockholm, of all places, and then goes from there. "Brings off effects comparable to those of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who can persuade the reader to believe the unbelievable" (New York Review of Books). Bruno Schulz's luminary-admirers are the pantheon of 20th-century American literature: Isaac Bashevis Singer (who considered him greater than Marcel Proust), Saul Bellow, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, John Updike, and of course, Philip and Cynthia. Ozick herself is a writer's writer, who will reward those who take the trouble of dipping into and being lost, if only momentarily, in her singular universe. She is writing in three literary traditions simultaneously, all of them at the most profound level imaginable: The ancient Jewish, the modern European, 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 blue ink-pen on the title page by Cynthia Ozick. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. Ozick's signature on this copy is the best we have ever seen: Clean, flowing, elegant. This title is a great book. 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. 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 collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER CYNTHIA OZICK TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0394547012.

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