The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays of John Simon - Hardcover

Simon, John Ivan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555841805 ISBN 13: 9781555841805

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1989

Synopsis

Essays discuss Camus, Sartre, Barthes, Shaw, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, Updike, Hellman, and Mailer

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Without referring to prevailing theories of schools of thought, New York magazine drama critic and author ( Ingmar Bergman Directs ) Simon, in these 49 entertaining pieces of book chat, tries to impart "what makes a work or an author sui generis" and how he rates that "particular quiddity." Widely but mistakenly regarded as mainly a negative critic, Simon brings high standards to bear on American, English, French, Slavic, Italian and Hispanic writers. He praises Randall Jarrell's "brilliantly and justly destructive reviews," Ian Hamilton's biography of Robert Lowell, Stevie Smith's verse, Camus's notebooks and the writings of Grass, Kafka, Kundera and Borges, among others. But acknowledging that "in a critic, complaining is often necessary where it hurts most," he castigates Norman Mailer's "usual jumble of megalomania, phantasmagoria, marketable paranoia, and unprovable assertions," Gore Vidal's "want of strong, memorable, living characters" and the limitations of structuralism, semiotics and deconstructionism. He also cannot resist pointing out mistranslations, stylistic infelicities, and grammatical and spelling errors.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Simon wrote most of these essays as book reviews, a form that brings out his pungent wit more than his analytical skills. He is a hard-nosed traditionalist who relates the writer's work to his life (again and again he refers the complexities of the work to some form of "dualism" in the writer). This focus makes for some gossipy pieces on American books of the Seventies, though there are more valuable appreciations of Kafka, Musil, Stevie Smith, and other moderns. The book could enjoyably introduce browsers to some major authors, especially from Europe, yet its audience will be limited. Academic librarians will find fuller discussions elswhere, while public librarians will see more demand for Simon's better-known film and theater reviews.Donald Ray, Manhattanville Coll. Lib., Purchase, N.Y.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 1555841805
• ISBN 13: 9781555841805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 453