{"id":2839,"date":"2010-07-20T14:46:21","date_gmt":"2010-07-20T18:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=2839"},"modified":"2010-10-27T13:19:03","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T17:19:03","slug":"five-essential-books-for-the-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/07\/20\/five-essential-books-for-the-critic\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Essential Books for The Critic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over on the <a href=\"http:\/\/bookcritics.org\/blog\/archive\/critical_library_lorin_stein\/\">National Book Critics Circle blog<\/a>, Lorin Stein has shared five books that he believes belong in any reviewer&#8217;s library. Here, Lorin explains the charisma of Susan Sontag: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If you are (or want to be) a critic, then sometimes I think it&#8217;s good to ask what criticism is for. The first book that made me do that was Susan Sontag&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Against-Interpretation-Essays-Susan-Sontag\/dp\/0312280866\">Against Interpretation<\/a><\/em>. &#8220;We need an erotics, not a hermeneutics, of art.&#8221; I was sitting after school in a Swensen&#8217;s ice cream parlor when I read that. I had to go home and look up the word hermeneutics. But the reviews gave one the gist. This was criticism as seduction. Sontag could make a semi-literate fifteen-year-old want to read Michel Leiris or Samuel Beckett or see a Godard film. She made it all seem both glamorous and accessible\u2014which are things I still feel art should be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And here, how Vivian Gornick shaped his own writing:  <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>My favorite contemporary book of criticism is Vivian Gornick&#8217;s collection <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/End-Novel-Love-Vivian-Gornick\/dp\/0807062235\/\">The End of the Novel of Love<\/a><\/em>. To me that book and Studies make a diptych\u2014both are basically concerned with what Gornick calls &#8220;love as metaphor.&#8221; I read <em>The End of the Novel of Love<\/em> in my twenties\u2014twice, in the space of a day. Since then I have never written an essay that wasn&#8217;t, deeply and superficially, indebted to Gornick. For years I tried to model my sentences on hers. My sense of criticism\u2014that it must tell a story, that the story must be true, that the story must unlock a secret in the critic&#8217;s own inner life\u2014I owe entirely to her example. Whenever a reader points out the similarity of my approach (and my prose) to hers, it is the praise that pleases me most.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Lorin Stein has shared five books that he believes belong in any reviewer&#8217;s library. Here, Lorin explains the charisma of Susan Sontag: If you are (or want to be) a critic, then sometimes I think it&#8217;s good to ask what criticism is for. The first book that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[17,478,456,479,354,477,75],"class_list":["post-2839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-books","tag-criticism","tag-lorin-stein","tag-national-book-critics-circle","tag-recommendations","tag-reviews","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Five Essential Books for The Critic by Thessaly La Force<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 20, 2010 \u2013 Over on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Lorin Stein has shared five books that he believes belong in any reviewer&#039;s library. 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