Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

Acocella, Joan

Paperback

Letters & EssaysDanceFiction Anthologies

Publisher Price: $20.00

ISBN10: 1250338077
ISBN13: 9781250338075
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: Feb 18 2025
Pages: 368
Weight: 0.89
Height: 0.98 Width: 5.81 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

A collection of the New Yorker critic's finest essays, which examine the books that reveal and record our world.

Joan Acocella was one of our finest cultural critics (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it--its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?

The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the final decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: life and art. In agile, inspired prose, she moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knew no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella is our dream companion among its shelves.

Includes 25 black-and-white images

1 different editions

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