Collected Stories

Resumen del libro

Masterly collection of short stories by an American novelist at the height of her powers It is the stories upon which Cynthia Ozick's literary reputation rests. She writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness. She has created a timeless collection in which Greek mythology, superstition and the religious and cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in America collide.

The Pagan Rabbi is seduced by a tree sprite after seeing his daughter rescued from drowning by a water sprite. Such ecstasy is not permitted to mortals and so the scholar must die. He hangs himself with his prayer shawl as he watches the strangely beautiful nymph decay.

In Envy, a Yiddish poet who watches the success of a contemporary, becomes very like a character in an I.B. Singer story entrapped by his anguish and haunted by the memory of a child. In the Doctor's Wife, the most gentle of the stories, a poor doctor not unlike Chekhov endures family life in which he is adored by his three sisters and oppressed by his family obligations.

In these stories, we see Ozick defining herself and her literary territory. The stories may be read purely as evocations of Jewish experience, where time seems to have by-passed these characters. In the Butterfly and the Traffic Light, Jerusalem is seen upon a hill as only it can be in legend, and America is said not to have cities scarred by battles.

Biografía del autor

x{0026}lt;P x{0026}lt;B Cynthia Ozickx{0026}lt;/B (Nueva York, 1928) es una de las narradoras norteamericanas más importantes de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Sus padres, farmacéuticos rusos, inculcaron una profunda fe judía a Ozick, que se crió en el barrio neoyorquino del Bronx. Autora de ensayos, novelas y cuentos, es una de las herederas más aventajadas del realismo decimonónico en lengua inglesa, y se la ha comparado con figuras de la talla de Charles Dickens y Jane Austen. Su nombre suele sonar en relación al Premio Nobel de Literatura, ha sido candidata al Man Booker International Prize y el Orange Prize, y se la ha descrito como la Emily Dickinson del Bronx . Lumen ha publicado sus novelas x{0026}lt;I Los últimos testigosx{0026}lt;/I (2006), x{0026}lt;I Cuerpos extrañosx{0026}lt;/I (2013), esta última un homenaje a x{0026}lt;I Los embajadoresx{0026}lt;/I , de Henry James, a quien ella considera su maestro; x{0026}lt;I Cuentos reunidosx{0026}lt;/I (2015), un volumen con los cuentos más destacados de la autora y x{0026}lt;I El chalx{0026}lt;/I (2016), una joya que resume todo el horror del siglo XX y se adelanta a las tragedias del XXI.x{0026}lt;/P