Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between American writers and artists, from Henry James and Mathew Brady, to Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, to Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, to Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. The accumulation of these pairings draws the reader into the mysterious process by which creativity has been sparked and passed on, from the Civil War through the civil rights movement.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A masterpiece . . . A Chance Meeting takes thirty American writers and artists from Henry James to Robert Lowell, and braids them together in thirty-six encounters. Each person comes round two or three times, and every meeting, friendship and collaboration has a resonance that can be heard down the ages until what you have before you is an immense chain of artistic consequences.”
–The Economist
“Dazzling . . . a book that’s as addictive as popcorn . . . A Chance Meeting heralds an auspicious beginning to an already thrilling career. It elevates name dropping to an art, and transforms literary criticism into a party.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Symphonic . . . elegant and elegiac . . . [A Chance Meeting] answers hungers you did not even know you had. . . . At book’s end, the world to which Cohen returns you is more vivid, peopled with new acquaintances. . . . Outstanding.”
–Chicago Tribune
“Enthralling…The 36 essays, as they progress… from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, constitute something of a new genre, rare in our period…What is being divined is nothing less than a century or so of American taste, the nature of modern literary and artistic tangency in the United States…I know of no remotely analogous cultural articulation -- not even Alfred Kazin's richly rehearsed An American Procession -- that ventures so explicitly, and so readily, into the American briar patch of racial and sexual encounters….Rachel Cohen's vision of the life of art in her chosen century, and the effect of that vision upon her reader, is one of an astonishing gladness.”
— Richard Howard, front page review, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Innovative…faultless. . . [Cohen] gives us a more intimate sense of these people in a few pages than one sometimes gleans from entire biographies.”
— The New Yorker
“Captivating…like an elaborate fugue…[Cohen’s] prose is elegant yet plain, and her judgments sound and generous…While carving a set of brilliant miniatures, Cohen is also indirectly telling a story of sex, race, political protest and celebrity culture in America, from the Victorian era to the 1960s."
— The Boston Globe
“Cunningly crafted and meticulously written…[Rachel Cohen] has produced, in her first book, something fresh and unexpected and promising.
What Cohen has written is not so much a group biography as a sort of evocative matrix of writers and artists over time, with exhilarating overlap and cross-reference.” — The New Republic
“Stylish… A Chance Meeting explores the imaginative enlargement that results from an encounter with an inventive (and kindred) mind…Cohen writes like a fiction writer…[and] deftly evokes character through eccentric detail.”
-- Slate
“An innovative hybrid of biography, cultural history, ‘imaginative nonfiction,’ and gossipy anecdote. In Cohen’s great chain of being, one brilliant creator is linked to another and another, so that American culture is seen as the vibrant organic whole it truly is.”
-Newsday
“For her astonishing literary debut, Rachel Cohen spent ten years exploring the . . . encounters of some of the greatest names in American arts and letters….Impeccable.”
-- Vogue
“A tour de force of literary historical imagination, A Chance Meeting is grounded by remarkable erudition without being merely tethered to it. These days, when so many studies serve to entomb their subjects, one feels blessedly grateful for a book that brings them to life.”
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"I can't think of any book that would give more raw pleasure to a book-reading person than A Chance Meeting. Our sense of the continuum of literary community is strengthened and shaded by these stories, which are told with a strange alchemy of grace, restraint, humor and passion."
-Dave Eggers
"As original and impressive a work of cultural history as I have encountered in years."
-Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer-prize winning author of Carry Me Home
"It can sometimes seem as if all American artists and writers are, and always have been, lone figures who go about their business without any contact with others of their kind. Rachel Cohen has written a lively and fascinating book that turns this idea on its head. Through the captivating device of what the French call 'the magic of the unlikely encounter', she traces a tradition of meeting, sharing, and encouragement among individual writers, painters, and photographers that has enriched American arts and letters in ways that could never have been foreseen. Cohen offers the reader the gift of interconnected portraits, tightly drawn and cleverly told, then stands aside and allows the stories of these encounters -- good as any fiction -- to work their magic. Compelling and delightful."
- Thad Carhart, author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
"A wonderful, absorbing book in which information, anecdote, literary understanding and gossip take fire and are transformed into insight. Rachel Cohen's wit and learning, conjoined, are a marvel. The writing of A Chance Meeting, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is at a rare level of grace. This is a book worth returning to, immensely distinguished and pleasurable."
- Robert Pinsky
"How rare to find a book that acts as both intellectual tonic and spiritual inspiration. Even rarer that it's written by a first-time author. The writing is elegant, poetic, and true. The monumentally deep reading that went into it is indeed its own kind of religion -- a temple of worship for thinking people who believe in the human artistic impulse."
-John Burnham Schwartz
“A Chance Meeting is a brilliant, innovative journey through American culture. It manages simultaneously to be intimate and sweeping, wide-ranging and sharply focused. Best of all, it makes its own quirky path through cultural history seem both serendipitous and inevitable. Like so many of the writers whose early successes she examines, Rachel Cohen is destined for great things.”
-Geoff Dyer
“There are thirty-six braided essays in Rachel Cohen’s lyrically evocative celebration of the American cultural provenance. Read one of them and you won’t be able to keep yourself from reading the next. Read them all and you’ll emerged transformed, transfigured: so that’s what this whole adventure has been about — that splendor, that anguish, this bounty. What a lavish gift there is in this book. Where does this new young writer get off being so good? And how do the rest of us get off being so lucky?”
-Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York University Institute for the Humanities and author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder
–The Economist
“Dazzling . . . a book that’s as addictive as popcorn . . . A Chance Meeting heralds an auspicious beginning to an already thrilling career. It elevates name dropping to an art, and transforms literary criticism into a party.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Symphonic . . . elegant and elegiac . . . [A Chance Meeting] answers hungers you did not even know you had. . . . At book’s end, the world to which Cohen returns you is more vivid, peopled with new acquaintances. . . . Outstanding.”
–Chicago Tribune
“Enthralling…The 36 essays, as they progress… from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, constitute something of a new genre, rare in our period…What is being divined is nothing less than a century or so of American taste, the nature of modern literary and artistic tangency in the United States…I know of no remotely analogous cultural articulation -- not even Alfred Kazin's richly rehearsed An American Procession -- that ventures so explicitly, and so readily, into the American briar patch of racial and sexual encounters….Rachel Cohen's vision of the life of art in her chosen century, and the effect of that vision upon her reader, is one of an astonishing gladness.”
— Richard Howard, front page review, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Innovative…faultless. . . [Cohen] gives us a more intimate sense of these people in a few pages than one sometimes gleans from entire biographies.”
— The New Yorker
“Captivating…like an elaborate fugue…[Cohen’s] prose is elegant yet plain, and her judgments sound and generous…While carving a set of brilliant miniatures, Cohen is also indirectly telling a story of sex, race, political protest and celebrity culture in America, from the Victorian era to the 1960s."
— The Boston Globe
“Cunningly crafted and meticulously written…[Rachel Cohen] has produced, in her first book, something fresh and unexpected and promising.
What Cohen has written is not so much a group biography as a sort of evocative matrix of writers and artists over time, with exhilarating overlap and cross-reference.” — The New Republic
“Stylish… A Chance Meeting explores the imaginative enlargement that results from an encounter with an inventive (and kindred) mind…Cohen writes like a fiction writer…[and] deftly evokes character through eccentric detail.”
-- Slate
“An innovative hybrid of biography, cultural history, ‘imaginative nonfiction,’ and gossipy anecdote. In Cohen’s great chain of being, one brilliant creator is linked to another and another, so that American culture is seen as the vibrant organic whole it truly is.”
-Newsday
“For her astonishing literary debut, Rachel Cohen spent ten years exploring the . . . encounters of some of the greatest names in American arts and letters….Impeccable.”
-- Vogue
“A tour de force of literary historical imagination, A Chance Meeting is grounded by remarkable erudition without being merely tethered to it. These days, when so many studies serve to entomb their subjects, one feels blessedly grateful for a book that brings them to life.”
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"I can't think of any book that would give more raw pleasure to a book-reading person than A Chance Meeting. Our sense of the continuum of literary community is strengthened and shaded by these stories, which are told with a strange alchemy of grace, restraint, humor and passion."
-Dave Eggers
"As original and impressive a work of cultural history as I have encountered in years."
-Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer-prize winning author of Carry Me Home
"It can sometimes seem as if all American artists and writers are, and always have been, lone figures who go about their business without any contact with others of their kind. Rachel Cohen has written a lively and fascinating book that turns this idea on its head. Through the captivating device of what the French call 'the magic of the unlikely encounter', she traces a tradition of meeting, sharing, and encouragement among individual writers, painters, and photographers that has enriched American arts and letters in ways that could never have been foreseen. Cohen offers the reader the gift of interconnected portraits, tightly drawn and cleverly told, then stands aside and allows the stories of these encounters -- good as any fiction -- to work their magic. Compelling and delightful."
- Thad Carhart, author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
"A wonderful, absorbing book in which information, anecdote, literary understanding and gossip take fire and are transformed into insight. Rachel Cohen's wit and learning, conjoined, are a marvel. The writing of A Chance Meeting, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is at a rare level of grace. This is a book worth returning to, immensely distinguished and pleasurable."
- Robert Pinsky
"How rare to find a book that acts as both intellectual tonic and spiritual inspiration. Even rarer that it's written by a first-time author. The writing is elegant, poetic, and true. The monumentally deep reading that went into it is indeed its own kind of religion -- a temple of worship for thinking people who believe in the human artistic impulse."
-John Burnham Schwartz
“A Chance Meeting is a brilliant, innovative journey through American culture. It manages simultaneously to be intimate and sweeping, wide-ranging and sharply focused. Best of all, it makes its own quirky path through cultural history seem both serendipitous and inevitable. Like so many of the writers whose early successes she examines, Rachel Cohen is destined for great things.”
-Geoff Dyer
“There are thirty-six braided essays in Rachel Cohen’s lyrically evocative celebration of the American cultural provenance. Read one of them and you won’t be able to keep yourself from reading the next. Read them all and you’ll emerged transformed, transfigured: so that’s what this whole adventure has been about — that splendor, that anguish, this bounty. What a lavish gift there is in this book. Where does this new young writer get off being so good? And how do the rest of us get off being so lucky?”
-Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York University Institute for the Humanities and author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder
About the Author
RACHEL COHEN grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and graduated from Harvard. She has written for The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney’s, and other publications. Her essays appeared in Best American Essays 2003 and the 2003 Pushcart Anthology. Cohen has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for the manuscript of A Chance Meeting. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Past Cultural Icons Lead the Way on their Inter-connected Path,
By
This review is from: A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (Paperback)
Everything the editorial reviews say about "A Chance Meeting" is all true. Rachel Cohen has placed 30 major American cultural figures--writers and artists--in 36 intertwined encounters ranging more than a century (1854-1967) that reads like a cross of a gossipy letter home (back when we did that) and carefully thought-out commentary and conjecture.
This book is not only an informative, fun, and thought-provoking read--for artists and writers, it is a well of companionship. Have you ever been lonely in your studio or study as you created? Have you ever been broke, searching for that next fellowship or contract? Have you ever been inspired by a chance meeting of a fellow/sister artist and writer? Did you ever wonder what pleasures and problems fame might bring? These and many other questions are answered in these rich encounters. Authors and artists I've studied are presented here as human beings working to remain human while they create their work. This is a tremendous guidebook not only for lovers of cultural history, but also for current makers of culture. --Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Intimate Portrait of Various Artists,
By
This review is from: A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (Paperback)
Much like her narrative, Cohen's eyes draw the reader into her own world from the surface of her dustjacket. And what is that world? A world of intimiate connections expressed through the smallest of gestures and the shortest of moments. It is obvious from reading A Chance Meeting that Cohen has entwined herself with each and every one of her subjects to become their close friend, despite being decades away from meeting them in person. That doesn't stop her, however, from creating a wonderful narrative of shared moments and chance meetings between various artists of the early 20th Century. Whether those actors or authors managed to sustain a relationship for years, or merely sense each other from across the room, doesn't matter as Cohen has an art for deeply plumbing each character's soul to see the impact that such meetings have upon their decisions. Not every one is moved by such small encounters as an introduction, but Cohen pieces together a rich tapestry of influential artists, each of which motivated another through such moments, and does a fine job of it. Finally, one gets to see the authors completely naked, instead of through the rough hewn lens of their work.
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THEY HAD COME IN FROM THE COUNTRY. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
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Van Vechten, Henry James, New York, William James, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, William Dean Howells, Annie Adams Fields, Hart Crane, Marcel Duchamp, Sarah Orne Jewett, United States, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Leo Stein, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Mathew Brady, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Alfred Stieglitz, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Avedon, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cage New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
THEY HAD COME IN FROM THE COUNTRY. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
nigger heaven Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Van Vechten, Henry James, New York, William James, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, William Dean Howells, Annie Adams Fields, Hart Crane, Marcel Duchamp, Sarah Orne Jewett, United States, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Leo Stein, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Mathew Brady, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Alfred Stieglitz, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Avedon, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cage New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
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- Henry James by Harry T. Moore on 9 pages
- Personal Memoirs: Ulysses S. Grant (Modern Library War) by Ulysses S. Grant on 6 pages
- Henry James by Leon Edel on 6 pages
- The Souls of Black Folk (Dover Thrift Editions) by W. E. B. Du Bois on 6 pages
- For the Union Dead. by Robert, Lowell on 5 pages
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