Cynthia Ozick Books In Order

Novels

  1. Trust (1966)
  2. The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)
  3. The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)
  4. The Puttermesser Papers (1997)
  5. Heir to the Glimmering World (2004)
  6. The Bear Boy (2005)
  7. Foreign Bodies (2010)

Collections

  1. The Pagan Rabbi (1971)
  2. Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)
  3. Levitation (1982)
  4. The Shawl (1989)
  5. Collected Stories (2006)
  6. Dictation (2008)
  7. Antiquities and Other Stories (2022)

Novellas

  1. Antiquities (2021)

Non fiction

  1. Art and Ardor (1983)
  2. Metaphor and Memory (1989)
  3. What Henry James Knew (1993)
  4. Fame and Folly (1996)
  5. Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character (1996)
  6. Quarrel and Quandary (2000)
  7. The Best American Essays: 1998 (2001)
  8. The Din in the Head (2006)
  9. Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016)
  10. Letters of Intent (2017)

Novels Book Covers

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Novellas Book Covers

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Cynthia Ozick Books Overview

Trust

Money and conscience are at the heart of Cynthia Ozick’s masterly first novel, narrated by a nameless young woman and set in the private world of wealthy New York, the dire landscape of postwar Europe, and the mythical groves of a Shakespearean isle. Beginning in the 1930s and extending through four decades, Trust is an epic tale of the narrator’s quest for her elusive father, a scandalous figure whom she has never known. In a provocative afterword, Ozick reflects on how she came to write the novel and discusses the cultural shift in the nature of literary ambition in the years since.

The Cannibal Galaxy

This novel is about the uneasy condition of Jewish heritage in the prevailing Gentile culture of middle America.

The Messiah of Stockholm

A small group of Jews weave a web of intrigue and fantasy around a book reviewer’s contention that he is the son of Borus Schultz, the legendary Polish writer killed by the Na*zis before his magnum opus, THE MESSIAH, could be brought to light.

The Puttermesser Papers

With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport. And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call ‘reality.’Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. ‘The finest achievement of Ozick’s career…
It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting.’ San Francisco Chronicle’Fanciful, poignant…
so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom.’ The New York Times’A crazy delight.’ The New York Time Book Review

Heir to the Glimmering World

Cynthia Ozick is an American master at the height of her powers in Heir to the Glimmering World, a grand romantic novel of desire, fame, fanaticism, and unimaginable reversals of fortune. Ozick takes us to the outskirts of the Bronx in the 1930s, as New York fills with Europe’s ousted dreamers, turned overnight into refugees. Rose Meadows unknowingly enters this world when she answers an ambiguous want ad for an ‘assistant’ to a Herr Mitwisser, the patriarch of a large, chaotic household. Rosie, orphaned at eighteen, has been living with her distant relative Bertram, who sparks her first erotic desires. But just as he begins to return her affection, his lover, a radical socialist named Ninel Lenin spelled backward, turns her out. And so Rosie takes refuge from love among refugees of world upheaval. Cast out from Berlin s elite, the Mitwissers live at the whim of a mysterious benefactor, James A’Bair. Professor Mitwisser is a terrifying figure, obsessed with his arcane research. His distraught wife, Elsa, once a prominent physicist, is becoming unhinged. Their willful sixteen year old daughter runs the household: the exquisite, enigmatic Anneliese. Rosie’s place here is uncertain, and she finds her fate hanging on the arrival of James. Inspired by the real Christopher Robin, James is the Bear Boy, the son of a famous children’s author who recreated James as the fanciful subject of his books. Also a kind of refugee, James runs from his own fame, a boy adored by the world but grown into a bitter man. It is Anneliese s fierce longing that draws James back to this troubled house, and it is Rosie who must help them all resist James s reckless orbit. Ozick lovingly evokes these perpetual outsiders thrown together by surprising chance. The hard times they inherit still hold glimmers of past hopes and future dreams. Heir to the Glimmering World is a generous delight.

Foreign Bodies

In her sixth novel, Cynthia Ozick retells the story of Henry James’s The Ambassadors as a photographic negative, retaining the plot but reversing the meaning. Foreign Bodies transforms Henry James s prototype into a brilliant, utterly original, new American classic. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to leave New York for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of her brother s family and even, after so long, her ex husband. Every one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months in that fateful year. Traveling from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, facing her ex husband and finally shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, Bea Nightingale is a newly liberated divorcee who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the very people she tries to help.

The Pagan Rabbi

This collection of short stories by Cynthia Ozick contains works such as ‘The Pagan Rabbi‘, ‘Virility’ and ‘Envy; or Yiddish in America’.

Bloodshed and Three Novellas

This collection of novellas by Cynthia Ozick includes works such as ‘Bloodshed’, where a sermon detailing biblical sacrifice touches its contemporary skeptical hero, and ‘Usurpation’, a group of stories within stories in which the ghost of the poet Tchernikhovsky appears.

Levitation

A collection of five stories which play upon the theme of deception and the inability to see.

The Shawl

Two award winning works of fiction by one of America’s finest writers, together in one collection. In ‘The Shawl,’ a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In ‘Rosa,’ that same woman appears 30 years later, ‘a mad woman and a scavenger’ in a Miami hotel. She has no life in the present because her past will never end. In both stories, there is a shawl a shawl that can sustain a starving child, inadvertently destroy her, or magically conjure her back to life. Both stories were originally published in the New Yorker in the 1980s; each was included in the annual Best American Short Stories and awarded First Prize in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Each succeeds in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness of its aftermath. Fiercely immediate, complex, and unforgettable, each is a masterwork by a writer the New York Times hailed as ‘the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time.’

Dictation

Four stories of comedy, deception, and revenge, including one previously unpublished, from the acclaimed author of Heir to the Glimmering World. Cynthia Ozick’s new work of fiction brings together four long stories that showcase this incomparable writer s sly humor and piercing insight into the human heart. Each starts in the comic mode, with heroes who suffer from willful self deceit. These not so innocents proceed from self deception to deceiving others, who do not take it lightly. Revenge is the consequence and for the reader, a delicious, if dark, recognition of emotional truth. The glorious new novella Dictation imagines a fateful meeting between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of their fame. Timid Miss Hallowes, who types for Conrad, comes under the influence of James s Miss Bosanquet, high spirited, flirtatious, and scheming. In a masterstroke of genius, Ozick hatches a plot between them to insert themselves into posterity. Ozick is at her most devious, delightful best in these four works, illuminating the ease with which comedy can glide into calamity.

Metaphor and Memory

From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes a new collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug of war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art’s contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.

Fame and Folly

Why do so many brilliant writers turn out to be anything but brilliant in their personal conduct? From Henry James to Salman Rushdie, from Anthony Tollope to Mark Twain, author Cynthia Ozick looks at our literary idols and reveals not feet of clay, but flawed and beating hearts, and in so doing inspires us to a fresh admiration of their achievements.

Quarrel and Quandary

Quarrel & Quandary showcases the manifold talents of one of our leading and award winning critics and essayists. In nineteen opulent essays, Cynthia Ozick probes Dostoevsky for insights into the Unabomber, questions the role of the public intellectual, and dares to wonder what poetry is. She roams effortlessly from Kafka to James, Styron to Stein, and, in the book’s most famous essay, dissects the gaudy commercialism that has reduced Anne Frank to ‘usable goods.’ Courageous, audacious, and sublime, these essays have the courage of conviction, the probing of genius, and the durable audacity to matter.

The Din in the Head

One of America’s foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. Her new collection of spirited essays focuses on the essential joys of great literature, with particular emphasis on the novel. With razor sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, she investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and others. In a posthumous and hilariously harassing Unfortunate Interview with Henry James, Ozick s hero is shocked by a lady reporter. In Highbrow Blues and in reflections on her own early fiction, she writes intimately of the din in our heads, that relentless inner hum, and the curative power of literary imagination. The Din in the Head is sure to please fans of Ozick, win her new readers, and excite critical controversy and acclaim.

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