Elizabeth Hardwick Knihy

First published in 1899, Dom Casmurro is acknowledged as the finest achievement of the great Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, and among the most important novels ever written in the Portuguese language.

Elizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.

Compiles a selection of the best literary essays of the year 1985 which were originally published in American periodicals.

Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

The life story of the author of Moby-Dick furnishes an analysis of all of Melville's writings and depicts his days as a whaleship deckhand and his bitterness over the public's failure to embrace his master work, Moby-Dick. 25,000 first printing.

Essays on music, art, pop culture, literature, and politics by the renowned essayist and observer of contemporary life, now collected together for the first time. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays, a book that proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has gathered here—none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick’s work—make it clear that her powers extended far beyond literary criticism, encompassing a vast range of subjects, from New York City to Faye Dunaway, from Wagner’s Parsifal to Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions, and from the pleasures of summertime to grits soufflé. In these often surprising, always well-wrought essays, we see Hardwick’s passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.

›Verführung und Betrug‹ kreist um die Rolle der Frau in der Literatur, sowohl als Autorin als auch als Heldin oder Opfer in den erzählerischen Werken der Weltliteratur. Elizabeth Hardwick stellt uns die Brontës vor Augen, die Frauen in Ibsens Dramen, die »Opfer und Sieger« Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath und Virginia Woolf, und die »Amateure«, die Begleiterinnen großer Männer, Dorothy Wordsworth und Jane Carlyle, die selber Tagebücher und Skizzen von hohem Wert hinterließen.

Der Sohn eines Kaufmanns, der sein Glück als Matrose an Bord eines Walfängers suchte, die Südsee bereiste und auf abenteuerlichem Wege desertierte, wagte den Beruf des freien Schriftstellers, nachdem seine Bücher über die literarisch noch unerschlossene Südsee Anklang fanden. Aus Sorge ums tägliche Brot zu populären Stoffen gezwungen, schockierte er Gesellschaft und religiöse Kreise durch Angriffe auf Missionare und Lob der Primitiven, flammte gegen Unterdrückung und die Prügelstrafe, bis ihm mit "Moby Dick" die größte symbolistische Prosadichtung Amerikas und die wohl reichste Seegeschichte der Welt gelang. Mit stilistischer, ja poetischer Eleganz fängt Elizabeth Hardwick die Höhen und Tiefen eines Lebens ein, das ebenso abenteuerlich begann, wie es in stiller Verborgenheit endete: Herman Melville starb als einsamer Zollinspektor von der Welt vergessen, bevor er als Schöpfer eines unsterblichen Meisterwerks in den Kanon der Literaturgiganten Eingang fand.§