East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Twenty-eight artists and two saints, essays, Joan Acocella

eng

contains biographical information

portraitsillustrations

no index present

non fiction

Twenty-eight artists and two saints

70107159

Joan Acocella

essays

From one of our most admired cultural critics ("A marvelous, canny writer"--Terry Castle, London Review of Books), thirty-one essays on some of the most influential artists of our time--writers, dancers, choreographers, sculptors--and two saints of all time, Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene. Among the people discussed: Italo Svevo, Stefan Zweig, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Joseph Roth, Vaslav Nijinsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth. What unites the book is Acocella's interest in the making of art and in the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requiresHere is Acocella on Primo Levi, a chemist who, after the Nazis failed to kill him, wrote Survival in Auschwitz, the noblest of the camp memoirs, and followed it with twelve more books . . . Hilary Mantel, the aspiring young lawyer stuck on a couch with a chronic and debilitating illness, who asked herself, "What can one do on a couch?" (well, one could write) and went on to become one of England's premier novelists . . . M. F. K. Fisher, who, numb with grief over her husband's suicide, dictated to her sister the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf . . . Marguerite Yourcenar, the victim of a ten-year writer's block, who found in an old trunk a draft of a forgotten novel and finished the book: Memoirs of Hadrian . . . George Balanchine, who, after losing his family at age nine, survived the Russian Revolution, escaped from the Soviet Union at twenty, was for five years house choreographer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, came to the United States with the promise that he could set up a ballet company, and had to wait another fifteen years before being able to establish his extraordinary New York City Ballet . . . And Acocella on Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc reminds us that saints in the service of their visions

A fire in the brain : Lucia Joyce -- Blocked : writer's block -- True confessions : Italo Svevo -- Quicksand : Stefan Zweig -- The frog and the crocodile : Simone de Beauvoir -- Becoming the emperor : Marguerite Yourcenar -- A hard case : Primo Levi -- European dreams : Joseph Roth -- The neapolitan finger : Andrea de Jorio -- The saintly sinner : Mary Magdalene -- After the ball was over : Vaslav Nijinsky -- Heroes and hero worship : Lincoln Kirstein -- "Sweet as a fig" : Frederick Ashton -- American dancer : Jerome Robbins -- Second act : Suzanne Farrell -- The soloist : Mikhail Baryshnikov -- The flame : Martha Graham -- Dancing and the dark : Bob Fosse -- The bottom line : Twyla Tharp -- On the contrary : H.L. Mencken -- After the laughs : Dorothy Parker -- Feasting on life : M.F.K. Fisher -- Finding Augie March : Saul Bellow -- Piecework : Sybille Bedford -- The spider's web : Louise Bourgeois -- Assassination on a small scale : Penelope Fitzgerald -- The hunger artist : Susan Sontag -- Counterlives : Philip Roth -- Perfectly frank : Frank O'Hara -- Devil's work : Hilary Mantel -- Burned again : Joan of Arc

28 artists and 2 saints