Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Vintage) [Paperback]

Joan Acocella (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage | Publication Date: February 12, 2008

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 and classic How to Cook a Wolf; and many other subjects, including Dorothy Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Saul Bellow. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints is indispensable reading on the making of art—and the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Acocella is the New Yorker's dance critic, but dancers and choreographers comprise a minority of the artists featured in this elegant collection of writings mostly from the New Yorker. The dance pieces are literally the center of the book, sandwiched between Acocella's lucid assessments of writers (and one sculptor, Louise Bourgeois). She has a taste for early 20th-century European, often Jewish novelists who, she says, helped create the modern consciousness in literature: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, among others. In featuring these long-forgotten writers, she fulfills what, in a fascinating profile of Susan Sontag, she calls "an essential function of criticism: that of introducing readers to... strange work, things they wouldn't ordinarily encounter." A particularly affecting look at Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1998 portrays a man long in search of an artistic home who had to find that home, finally, within himself. The essays that follow the dance pieces focus largely on American and British writers (Bellow, Philip Roth, Sybille Bedford). Acocella can flatten a book she dislikes with cool derision ("The less she knows, the more she tells us," Acocella says of Carol Shloss's biography of Lucia Joyce), but her passionate and penetrating endorsements of other works make you want to discover their pleasures firsthand—the best service a critic can render. (Feb. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Critic Acocella's deep knowledge of and organic feel for dance infuses her fleet-footed and witty prose. Like a dancer, she makes her art look easy, which it certainly is not, and what poise and range she evinces. Acocella has written expertly and vividly about dance for the New Yorker and other venues and is a keen literary critic as well. She has now collected 30 of her stellar artist profiles, electrifying portraits that seamlessly pair biography and criticism and draw authoritatively on psychology and history. Add to that Acocella's versatility and knack for choosing just the right individuals. Accompanied by superb photographs of the artists, Acocella's portraits bring into focus such complex figures as Lucia Joyce, James' mad dancing daughter; Mikhail Baryshnikov; Martha Graham; Bob Fosse; Marguerite Yourcenar; Dorothy Parker; Philip Roth; M. F. K. Fisher; and Susan Sontag; as well as the iconic Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc. How agile these firmly rooted yet whirling essays are, and how very enlightening. Acocella's portraits are so much fun to read, they feel like indulgences rather than writings that do no less than enrich and sustain culture. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307275760
• ISBN-13: 978-0307275769
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #568,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The creative life sympathetically examined, February 17, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Hardcover)

I have read a number of the essays in this collection and found them to be informative, insightful and at times, eye- opening. Acocella often chooses subjects who are not that well known , and who she feels have been neglected. Two of the novelists she writes about here, Joseph Roth and Hilary Mantel were little known to an American audience. But the essays I have read and very much enjoyed are those she has written on Stefan Zweig, and Saul Bellow. I also read with great interest her critical review of a biography on James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, one which Acocella feels makes exaggerated claims for Lucia's influence on her father's work. Another outstanding essay here is the one on Primo Levi who Acocella clearly believes is one of the great moral heroes of the century. Acocella has a real feeling for the struggles involved in the literary and artistic, the creative life. She often reveals a special kind of sympathy with her subject. And this is one of the things which makes her writing, to me anyway, so likeable. One feels the writer herself is a very understanding and considerate person, one whose own creative effort is diligent, caring, and intuitively wise.
I have not read all this collection but from what I have and know of the work of this writer I would recommend it strongly.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Artistic Essays That Count, April 10, 2007

By 

Daniel P. Lucas "A Reader" (Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Hardcover)

The essays on modern dance in America are particularly outstanding. Ms. Acocella writes with passion and knowledge. Many of her observations are succint yet sympathetic. They inform the book with a compassion for the individual artist's struggle to define his or her art; something not readily available in much of what passes for criticism these days. Her essay on Marguerite Yourcenar, the French writer who lived in Maine for much of her life, literally jumped off the page for me. No one who reads this book will be disappoited.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An inpiration to all creative people, March 22, 2007

By 

margaret hennig (switzerland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Hardcover)

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays.

This book is an inspiration to all creative people who have struggled with themselves and consequently their work. Better than any creative-self-help book, this brilliantly accomplished collection of essays, gives wonderful insights with amusing anecdotes into the live of artists. It is a study in problems that all artists face, whether they are writers, dancers, artists or saints.
About writing this book, the author says:" My concern is the pain that comes with the art-making, interfering with it, and how the artist deals with this......What allows the genius to flower is not neurosis, but its opposite, "ego strength", meaning amongst other things, ordinary Sunday- school virtues, such as tenacity, and above all the ability to survive disappointment."
Amongst the artists she discusses are; Stefan Zweig, Primo Levi, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bob Fosse, Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Roth, and Joan of Arc -an eclectic selection of gifted and talented people, who through their work, and our contact with them, have contributed in some way, to inspiring our lives.