Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393243468)

Adam Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute...[a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last eight years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Kirsch shows how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art. In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and life of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: "Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone." So shines literature, in these unflinchingly bold and provocative essays--as an illuminating, regenerative, and immortalizing force.

Author: Adam Kirsch
ISBN-10: 039324346X
ISBN-13: 9780393243468
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 11/17/2014
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.75h x 5.83w x 1.04d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 10/15/2014
Booklist 11/15/2014 pg. 12
Shelf Awareness 12/09/2014
New York Times Book Review 12/28/2014 pg. 26