The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
- 560 pages
- 20 hours of reading
Elizabeth Hardwick was a distinguished American literary critic and novelist. Her writings delve into the complexities of human relationships and the intricacies of the psyche with sharp intelligence and precise prose. Beyond her fiction, she was a formidable essayist and critic, known for her incisive analyses of contemporary literature and her staunch defense of high artistic standards. As a co-founder of a significant literary journal, she played a pivotal role in shaping the intellectual discourse surrounding literature in her era.






First published in 1899, Dom Casmurro is acknowledged as the finest achievement of the great Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, and among the most important novels ever written in the Portuguese language.
Elizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.
Compiles a selection of the best literary essays of the year 1985 which were originally published in American periodicals.
In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.
The life story of the author of Moby-Dick furnishes an analysis of all of Melville's writings and depicts his days as a whaleship deckhand and his bitterness over the public's failure to embrace his master work, Moby-Dick. 25,000 first printing.
Essays on music, art, pop culture, literature, and politics by the renowned essayist and observer of contemporary life, now collected together for the first time. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays, a book that proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has gathered here—none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick’s work—make it clear that her powers extended far beyond literary criticism, encompassing a vast range of subjects, from New York City to Faye Dunaway, from Wagner’s Parsifal to Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions, and from the pleasures of summertime to grits soufflé. In these often surprising, always well-wrought essays, we see Hardwick’s passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.
›Verführung und Betrug‹ kreist um die Rolle der Frau in der Literatur, sowohl als Autorin als auch als Heldin oder Opfer in den erzählerischen Werken der Weltliteratur. Elizabeth Hardwick stellt uns die Brontës vor Augen, die Frauen in Ibsens Dramen, die »Opfer und Sieger« Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath und Virginia Woolf, und die »Amateure«, die Begleiterinnen großer Männer, Dorothy Wordsworth und Jane Carlyle, die selber Tagebücher und Skizzen von hohem Wert hinterließen.(Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine frühere Ausgabe.)
Der Sohn eines Kaufmanns, der sein Glück als Matrose an Bord eines Walfängers suchte, die Südsee bereiste und auf abenteuerlichem Wege desertierte, wagte den Beruf des freien Schriftstellers, nachdem seine Bücher über die literarisch noch unerschlossene Südsee Anklang fanden. Aus Sorge ums tägliche Brot zu populären Stoffen gezwungen, schockierte er Gesellschaft und religiöse Kreise durch Angriffe auf Missionare und Lob der Primitiven, flammte gegen Unterdrückung und die Prügelstrafe, bis ihm mit "Moby Dick" die größte symbolistische Prosadichtung Amerikas und die wohl reichste Seegeschichte der Welt gelang. Mit stilistischer, ja poetischer Eleganz fängt Elizabeth Hardwick die Höhen und Tiefen eines Lebens ein, das ebenso abenteuerlich begann, wie es in stiller Verborgenheit endete: Herman Melville starb als einsamer Zollinspektor von der Welt vergessen, bevor er als Schöpfer eines unsterblichen Meisterwerks in den Kanon der Literaturgiganten Eingang fand.§