The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays; Joan Acocella

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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. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times , “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 And Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past 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, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling in the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.

February 20, 2024

 

About the Author

Joan B. Acocella was an American journalist who served as a dance and book critic for The New Yorker.

Acocella received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. Acocella was a 2012 Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Acocella has served as the senior critic and reviews editor for Dance Magazine and New York dance critic for the Financial Times. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and was appointed dance critic in 1998.

Her New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy", which appeared in the November 27, 1995 issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. (2004).

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