Mary McCarthy Books

Mary McCarthy's essays on Florence, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, offer an insightful, mesmerizing look into Florence's genealogy, archaeology, art, culture, and political life.

American writer Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, a philosopher who had fled Nazi Germany, met in New York City, and soon became friends. In Between Friends, a complete record of their epistolary dialogue which lasted a remarkable 25 years, the two intellectual celebrities trade ideas about politics, literature, and morality, and share gossip and intimate domestic details.

Pass her in the street and she would turn your head, She looks like she has all the answers. She looks like a woman in control. That is until a trip to Vienna turns into a nightmare. Anonymous phone calls, footsteps following her - a stalker.

Published in 1942, Mary McCarthy's first novel creates a fascinating portrait of a 1930s New York social circle.

"The author's personal journey through Florence and Venice, two cities whose names are associated with the Renaissance."--blackwells.co.uk viewed June 29, 2022

Mary McCarthy was a prominent literary figure known for her novels, memoirs, and incisive social criticism. Starting as a theater reviewer, she offered witty commentary on various topics, showcasing her sharp, humorous, and erudite style. This collection of essays spans her career and reflects the cultural controversies in American intellectual life.

Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her grandmothers- one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide the disastrous effects of a face-lift. There was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs, ' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction. ' But these were the people, along with the ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination.

In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer's highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. With Primo Levi, Roth discusses the stubborn core of rationality that helped the Italian chemist-writer survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz. With Milan Kundera, he analyzes the mix of politics and sexuality that made him the most subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia. With Edna O'Brien, he explores the circumstances that have forced generations of Irish writers into exile. Elsewhere Roth offers appreciative portraits of two friends--the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston--at the end of their careers, and gives us a masterful assessment of the work of Saul Bellow. Intimate, charming, and crackling with ideas about the interplay between imagination and the writer's historical situation, Shop Talk is a literary symposium of the highest level, presided over by America's foremost novelist.

The Group follows eight graduates from exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, forge careers, gossip and party in 1930s Manhattan.

An absorbing novel about a young man's voyage into adulthood, enlivened by Mary McCarthy's needling wit. You have to go away to understand home, you have to lose yourself to find yourself; Mary McCarthy's insight into her young hero - his awkward growing-up, his efforts to understand his time and place - create an authentic and thoughtful slice of cultural history. Hilary Mantel, Booker prize-winning author of 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies'