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Elizabeth Hardwick

    July 27, 1916 – December 2, 2007

    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.

    Sleepless Nights
    New York Stories Of Elizabeth
    The best American essays 1986
    Seduction and Betrayal
    Dom Casmurro
    The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979
    • 2022

      Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

      • 304 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      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.

      Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
    • 2020
    • 2015

      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.

      Dom Casmurro
    • 2010

      New York Stories Of Elizabeth

      • 224 pages
      • 8 hours of reading
      3.6(277)Add rating

      Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.

      New York Stories Of Elizabeth
    • 2001

      Seduction and Betrayal

      • 224 pages
      • 8 hours of reading
      4.0(462)Add rating

      Elizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.

      Seduction and Betrayal
    • 2000

      Penguin Lives: Herman Melville

      • 161 pages
      • 6 hours of reading

      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.

      Penguin Lives: Herman Melville
    • 1986
    • 1980

      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.

      Sleepless Nights