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    American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring
    American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring
    American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring
    Audiobook14 hours

    American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring

    Written by William Giraldi

    Narrated by Stephen Graybill

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist. American Audacity gathers Giraldi's fierce and witty considerations of American writers and themes, including a never-before-published appreciation of James Baldwin and an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American literature. With deep seeing and enormous learning, Giraldi considers giants from the past (Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee), some of our great living critics and novelists (Harold Bloom, Cynthia Ozick, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer), and those cultural-literary themes that have concerned him as a novelist (bestselling books, the problem of Catholic fiction, and his viral essay on bibliophilia). Demanding that literature be urgent and audacious, this book is itself an act of intellectual and stylistic daring. At a time when literature is threatened by ceaseless electronic distraction, Giraldi reaffirms the pleasure and wisdom of literary values.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9781684413119
    American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring
    Author

    William Giraldi

    William Giraldi grew up in Manville, New Jersey, and attended college at Drew University and Boston University. He is author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. He's been granted fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Oxford American, The New York Times, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review,The Baffler,Ploughshares, The Wall Street Journal,The New Criterion, and online at The Daily Beast and Salon. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.

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    Reviews for American Audacity

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      If you read the New York Times Book Review, the New York Book Review, the London Book Review, or even Slate, you've read this kind of intelligent critical work before. Giraldi is unusually good at it, and his work is distinguished by a passion that often goes right up to the edge of sympathy without quite going beyond. He's very smart, and he cares a lot. I particularly enjoyed his essay on Harper Lee, whom he believes was obviously manipulated into the release of an early book she had no plans to release while she was in full possession of herself. On the whole, however, I'm already well served by reading the work of a wide variety of critics, and didn't gain a lot by the intensive focus on this particular one.