Cynthia Ozick – författare

''A writer innately drawn to paradox, and to the moral questions inherent in the relationships between richness and poverty, mind and body, history and imagination'' Ali Smith''As cunning and rich as anything Ozick''s written'' Wall Street Journal''One of our era''s central writers. About a man ensnared by history, Antiquities is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are'' The New Yorker''Ozick''s prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave'' New York Review of BooksI remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing. In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie returns as a Trustee to the long-defunct boarding school that he attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir about the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school, about his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, about the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil.In this novella, and the three stories published alongside it, one of our most preeminent writers weaves together myth and mania, history and illusion to capture the shifting meanings of the past.A W&N Essential

Masterly collection of short stories by an American novelist at the height of her powersIt is the stories upon which Cynthia Ozick''s literary reputation rests. She writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness. She has created a timeless collection in which Greek mythology, superstition and the religious and cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in America collide. The Pagan Rabbi is seduced by a tree sprite after seeing his daughter rescued from drowning by a water sprite. Such ecstasy is not permitted to mortals and so the scholar must die. He hangs himself with his prayer shawl as he watches the strangely beautiful nymph decay. In Envy, a Yiddish poet who watches the success of a contemporary, becomes very like a character in an I.B. Singer story entrapped by his anguish and haunted by the memory of a child. In the Doctor''s Wife, the most gentle of the stories, a poor doctor not unlike Chekhov endures family life in which he is adored by his three sisters and oppressed by his family obligations. In these stories, we see Ozick defining herself and her literary territory. The stories may be read purely as evocations of Jewish experience, where time seems to have by-passed these characters. In the Butterfly and the Traffic Light, Jerusalem is seen upon a hill as only it can be in legend, and America is said not to have cities scarred by battles. This is a dazzling collection of short stories by an internationally celebrated novelist.

Masterly American novelist at the height of her powers with a 1930s story inspired by the real-life Christopher Robin.In the outskirts of the Bronx in 1930s New York, the Mitwisser clan are German refugees who survive at the whim of their vagabond benefactor, James A''Bair. James is heir to the fortune amassed by his father, the author of a wildly popular series of children''s books called The Bear Boy.Into their chaotic household comes Rose Meadows, orphaned at the age of eighteen. Employed as an assistant to the eccentric Professor Mitwisser, Rose''s position within the family is precarious, especially when the arrival of James threatens the fragile balance of the household.

Two masterful short stories: one depicts the horrors of the Holocaust, the other the lifetime of emptiness that pursues a ''survivor'' - by a Pulitzer Prize finalistThe Shawl is considered a modern classic - a masterpiece in two acts. The horror and desolation evoked through piercing imagery - first through the abomination of a Holocaust concentration camp murder, second through the eyes of the murdered child''s mother, thirty years later, now ''a madwoman and a scavenger'' - offers the reader a chilling insight into the empty suffering of a ''survivor''.In ''The Shawl'', a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her child, a child barely old enough to walk. The shawl that was the child''s security blanket and lone possession reappears in the second story, ''Rosa''. Rosa appears thirty years later, living in a Miami hotel and feeling the strain of a lifetime of pain: the hollowness of seeing her baby killed, of managing her harrowing memories she''s being told to forget, and of even now being treated as a specimen and not a human being.