Cynthia Ozick – författare

In her sixth novel, Cynthia Ozick retells the story of Henry James’s The Ambassadors as a photographic negative, retaining the plot but reversing the meaning.

Foreign Bodies transforms Henry James’s prototype into a brilliant, utterly original, new American classic. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to leave New York for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of her brother’s family and even, after so long, her ex-husband. Every one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months in that fateful year. Traveling from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, facing her ex-husband and finally shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, Bea Nightingale is a newly liberated divorcee who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the very people she tries to help. 

Money and conscience are at the heart of Cynthia Ozick''s masterly first novel, narrated by a nameless young woman and set in the private world of wealthy New York, the dire landscape of postwar Europe, and the mythical groves of a Shakespearean isle. Beginning in the 1930s and extending through four decades, Trust is an epic tale of the narrator''s quest for her elusive father, a scandalous figure whom she has never known. In a provocative afterword, Ozick reflects on how she came to write the novel and discusses the cultural shift in the nature of literary ambition in the years since.

''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.