Criterion Books – serie

Born in Vienna in 1936, David Pryce-Jones is the son of the well-known writer and editor of the Times Literary Supplement Alan Pryce-Jones and Therese “Poppy” Fould-Springer. He grew up in a cosmopolitan mix of industrialists, bankers, soldiers, and playboys on both sides of a family, embodying the fault lines of the title: “not quite Jewish and not quite Christian, not quite Austrian and not quite French or English, not quite heterosexual and not quite homosexual, socially conventional but not quite secure.”Graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, David Pryce-Jones served as Literary Editor of the Financial Times and the Spectator, a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and Senior Editor of National Review. Fault Lines is a memoir that spans Europe, America, and the Middle East and encompasses figures ranging from Somerset Maugham to Svetlana Stalin to Elie de Rothschild. As seen on Channel 4's My Grandparents' War, with Helena Bonham Carter, the memoir has the storytelling power of Pryce-Jones’s numerous novels and non-fiction books, and is perceptive and poignant testimony to the fortunes and misfortunes of the present age.

In Transit, Nicholas Pierce’s debut poetry collection, charts the poet’s maturation across three sections, each centering on a different kind of love, from the pedagogical to the romantic to the familial. Form and subject are inseparable in poems that consider the complex power dynamic of an older man befriending a younger one, that draw on such classic texts as Plato’s Symposium and Homer’s Odyssey to make sense of the seemingly random encounters and missed chances that, as one poem puts it, “make up a life.”As the book’s title suggests, these poems take place on the move, in cars, on boats and planes. They find the speaker abroad, as in “The Death of Argos,” a sonnet sequence that invents a new configuration for the form. Above all, though, the poems of In Transit attempt to capture a world in flux, turning to form as a stay against the transitory nature of experience.

Ithaca consists of sixty sonnets divided into two equal parts, “Ithaca” and “Gifts Reserved for Age.” In Homer’s Odyssey, Ithaca is the island home to which the hero returns after twenty years of war and perilous adventures. In Lehman’s “Ithaca” sequence, two phrases are strategically repeated, with variations: “Happy the man who . . .” and “What did he believe in?”In “Gifts Reserved for Age,” the restless traveler continues to recollect and make sense of his life. Ultimate questions are raised: Does God exist? Can art redeem reality and not just contrive ways to escape from it? What are the compensatory “gifts” that accompany growing old?Lehman, who has resided for many years in Ithaca, New York, does inventive things with the sonnet as a form and the sonnet sequence as the organizing principle of a unified book. Rich in allusion, not only to Homer’s epic but to a shelf of important writers and thinkers, Ithaca is a witty and erudite book for grown-up readers who look to poetry for inspiration, profundity, and intellectual stimulation.

The Necessity of Sculpture brings together a selection of articles on sculpture and sculptors from Eric Gibson’s nearly four-decade career as an art critic. It covers subjects as diverse as Mesopotamian cylinder seals, war memorials, and the art of the American West; stylistic periods such as the Hellenistic in Ancient Greece and Kamakura in medieval Japan; Michelangelo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and other historical figures; modernists like Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, and Alberto Giacometti; and contemporary artists including Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, and Jeff Koons. Organized chronologically by artist and period, this collection is as much a synoptic history of sculpture as it is an art chronicle. At the same time, it is an illuminating introduction to the subject for anyone coming to it for the first time.