Description
Book SynopsisAs an incisive and provocative critic of literature, language, and culture, George Steiner has acquired an international reputation and a devoted following. He scatters bright ideas everywhere, writes The New York Times Book Review, and they are sure to be picked up. This volume presents a rich sampling of Steiner''s ideas, including selections from his seminal books The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, and Language and Science. Aside from pointing to work that lies ahead, this anthology offers a rich retrospective of the intellectual ground Steiner has already covered. Whether discussing Marxist literary theory, the significance of Tolstoy, or the problems of treating sexual material in literature, Steiner''s writings give us the pleasure of watching an astute and nimble mind constantly at work.
Trade Review"[Steiner] is a remarkably powerful writer, as essays like 'The Hollow Miracle' and 'Postscript'...attest....[Here] he offers passionate, dexterous, erudite arguments."--The Christian Science Monitor
"George Steiner is arguably the most influential cultural mediator writing in English today. Through his essays he has exposed readers...to the latest news from the intellectual and literary fronts of Europe, in a style that is at once lucid and eloquent."--World Literature Today
"A plenteous feast--various and served up with intelligence and style...An intelligent, deeply felt humanism characterizes Steiner's work; a tradition of intelligence and style lives in this prolific man."--Los Angeles Times
"Steiner is a phenomenon. Reading him over the years, and now in portable form, I'm struck with the energy and, at is best, the relentless concentration of his thought."--Edward W. Said, The Nation
"No one now writing on literature can match [Steiner] as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing....[He] has commented with fine perceptiveness on a dizzying range of literary texts and cultural issues."--Robert Alter, The Washington Post Book World
"Steiner's style is by turns richly allusive, metaphoric, intensely concerned, prophetic, apocalyptic--and almost always captivating."--The National Review
"[Steiner is] in a class above most critics."--The Hudson Review
