A Few Good Voices in My Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries by Ted Solotaroff

A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries

Solotaroff, Ted

Harpercollins

A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries by Ted Solotaroff

HarperCollins, Publishers

Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson to Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. This son of Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." Editor Ted Solotaroff hasselected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that he regarded as his heritage and endeavored to pass on.

Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings

Literature & Fiction

KAZIN, Alfred

United States

Harper-perennial

Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that in his books, essays, and reviews, Kazin succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters, the one who kept closest track of its proceedings, its history, its symbiotic relationship with American society, and its relations with other Western literatures. He did so out of a particularly passionate concern for the significance and well-being of our literary heritage. The America that was mostly a political and cultural position-taking for his fellow New York intellectuals was for Kazin a lifelong possession and a complex fate. His working title for his final book, God and the American Writer, which dealt mostly with nineteenth-century authors, was "Absent Friends."
At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he typically put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." To indicate the development of this charged point of view, Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. These excerpts also provide the pleasure of his sharply etched portraits of the Brownsville, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, and Cape Cod literary milieus and of such figures as Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt.
The selections in Alfred Kazin's America follow the course of his career. They are introduced by the editor's substantial essay, which connects the youth to the man and both to the critic, and draws upon Solotaroff's own relations with him. This close joining of the personal to the critical seeks to pass on and reactivate a great American critic's presence and legacy.
As our sense of the American past continues to dry up and threatens to blow away in the heavy winds of change, those writers who can make our heritage come alive again and challenge us become all the more essential. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that takes us back to Emerson and forward through our literature to the better part of our own Americanism.

Harper

Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir

An autobiography of the literary editor describes his childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, his conflicted relationship with his parents, and the influence of the Depression, World War II, and his Jewish heritage

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Winner of the P.E.N./Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Truth Comes in Blows is renowned editor and critic Ted Solotaroff's prize-winning account of a coming of age at once quintessentially American and especially vexed. Planted between Ted and a normal boyhood was Ben Solotaroff, as hard a father to placate, defy, and finally accept as can be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, bullying, seductive, Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man? " almost all ego and almost no conscience" -who made a success of his glass business and a wasteland of his home life. Against a crystalline view of American life in the 1930s and '40s, Truth Comes in Blows places its classic themes-the ambivalent love of a son for his victimized mother, the romance of post-immigrant Jews with middle America, sports and masculinity, the guilty imperatives of breaking away-and renews them with a candor Philip Roth praised as "not only a literary achievement but a considerable moral achievement as well." A reading group guide is bound into the paperback.

W.W.Norton&Company

Twenty-four stories by American Jewish authors include works by E. L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon, Mark Helprin, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and others.

Writing Our Way Home

Short Stories & Anthologies

Random House Value Publishing

This landmark anthology brings together some of the best stories written in the last thirty years by and about American Jews. Saul Bellow tells a brutal coming-of-age story set in Chicago; Mark Helprin recalls a stint in the Israeli army during the Six-Day War; Grace Paley explores the complex relationship between Jews and Blacks; Philip Roth muses on what life would have been like for Kafka if he had come to America, and maybe dated Roth's aunt From I.B. Singer's unforgettable depiction of a widower in Miami Beach to Michael Chabon's California-style Jewish wedding and Allegra Goodman's satiric portrayal of a yuppie Orthodox family, a rare view--and one surprising in its diversity--emerges out of the contemporary experience in America.

The Schocken Book of Contemporary Jewish Fiction

Rapoport, Nessa

Schocken

Discourse On Hip Selected Writings of MI

Wayne State Univ@press

'The Red Hot Vacuum' is a constantly provocative assessment of the leading writers ofthe Nineteen Sixties, a decade when the literary giants of the past faded from the scene and in their wake, notes the author in his preface to these 37 essays, the literary consensus broke apart, like the social and political one, and the market for serious writing "soon became a kind of howling forum where all manner of ideas, styles, and standards contended for attention." Theodore Solotaroff's critical writings bring a notable lucidity and perspective to "the red hot vacuum" at the core of this chaotic creative age-a time of "the shrinkage of extremes between hard thought and easy attitudinizing, between originality and novelty, relevance and chic, distinction and celebrity." Editor-in-chief of the pioneering New American Review (and before that Associate Editor of Commentary and Editor of the New York Herald Tribune's literary supplement, Book Week), Solotaroff focuses his stringent yet sympathetic intellect on authors whose works came to full flower in the Sixties-Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag and James Purdy among them-as well as on the new work of established but newly relevant figures such as Sartre, Camus, Irving Howe, Richard Wright and Paul Goodman.

The red hot vacuum & other pieces on the writing of the sixties

Nonpareil Books

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Books by Solotaroff, Ted

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Solotaroff, Ted. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries

A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries

Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings

Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings

Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir

Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir

Writing Our Way Home

The Schocken Book of Contemporary Jewish Fiction

Discourse On Hip Selected Writings of MI

The red hot vacuum & other pieces on the writing of the sixties