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The New Yorker critic examines the books that reveal and record our world in a new essay collection.Joan Acocella, "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm....

Expanding on her absorbing and controversial 1995 "New Yorker" article, Joan Acocella examines the politics of Willa Cather criticism: how Cather's work has been seized upon and often distorted by critics on both the left and the right. Acocella argues that the central element of Cather's works was not a political agenda but rather a tragic vision of life. This beautifully written book makes a significant contribution to Cather studies and, at...

Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband's suicide, dictated the witty an...

Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell arrived in Northern Thailand in 1912. She was awed by its beauty and became devoted to its people. This work casts light on colonialism, the Asia missions, and the convulsive changes that a newly united Thailand underwent in the early 20th century.

In this brilliant, impassioned and controversial book, New Yorker critic Joan Acocella argues that twentieth-century literary critics from the Left and Right have misused Willa Cather and her works for their own political ends, and, in doing so, have either ignored or obscured her true literary achievement. In an acute and often very funny critique of the critics, Acocella untangles Cather's reputation from decades of politically motivated mis...

Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell arrived in Northern Thailand in 1912, the young wife of a recently ordained Presbyterian missionary. Thousands of miles lay between her and her grandparents' farm in Nova Scotia, where she had been born and raised. But over the next sixteen years, Thailand became her beloved new home. She was awed by its physical beauty -- the great rivers, the orchid-studded hills -- and became devoted to its people. Beginning as a n...

From 1985 to 1995 an estimated 40, 000 Americans, most of them women, were told they suffered from multiple personality disorder. Feminists, fundamentalists, and a substantial portion of the mental health community Andorsed this "Sybil-ing" of America. Sensation-seeking television talk shows took up the MPD rallying cry. In "Creating Hysteria, " Joan Acocella tells a riveting tale of therapists betraying their patients, of a psychotherapy prof...