Most Popular Books by Mary McCarthy

This is the author''s first novel, which relates the experiences of a young bohemian intellectual. The six episodes create a fascinating portrait of a New York social circle of the 1930s. McCarthy''s bold insight and virtuoso style won her immediate recognition as one of the most accomplished, versatile, and penetrating writers in americanca.

A journey through the glorious Italian city’s scenery, history, and culture, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Venice Observed and The Group. Mary McCarthy’s classic celebrates the Italian city often looked upon as the provincial sister to the better-dressed, more “feminine” Venice. To McCarthy, Florence, or Firenze, is a place of ageless enchantment, from the Duomo to the fortressed palaces. The Renaissance began here; art and architecture flourished. From its roots as a center of medieval trade to its transformation into one of the world’s wealthiest cities, McCarthy charts Florence’s rich and turbulent history. She introduces a cast of towering real-life characters. Through her probing writer’s lens, the poetry of Dante and the magnificent artistry of Raphael and Botticelli come vibrantly alive. Along this illuminating journey, McCarthy offers fascinating bits of trivia: There are no ruins in Florence because the Florentines aren’t sentimental about their past; America took its name from a Florentine traveler named Amerigo Vespucci. From Michelangelo to the Medicis to the story behind a statue’s missing head, The Stones of Florence is Mary McCarthy’s hymn to this unique city. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.

Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.

DIVDIVThe author of The Group, the groundbreaking bestseller and 1964 National Book Award finalist that shaped a generation of women, brings reminiscences of her girlhood to this intimate and illuminating memoir/divDIV How I Grew is Mary McCarthy’s intensely personal autobiography of her life from age thirteen to twenty-one./divDIV Orphaned at six, McCarthy was raised by her maternal grandparents in Seattle, Washington. Although her official birthdate is in 1912, it wasn’t until she turned thirteen that, in McCarthy’s own words, she was “born as a mind.” With detail driven by an almost astonishing memory recall, McCarthy gives us a masterful account of these formative years. From her wild adolescence—including losing her virginity at fourteen—through her eventual escape to Vassar, the bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic chronicles her relationships with family, friends, lovers, and the teachers who would influence her writing career./divDIV Filled with McCarthy’s penetrating insights and trenchant wit, this is an unblinkingly honest and fearless self-portrait of a young woman coming of age—and the perfect companion to McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./divDIV/div/div

DIVDIVA college instructor embarks on a fanatical quest to save his job—and enact righteous revenge—in this brilliantly acerbic satire of university politics during the early Cold War years/divDIV Henry Mulcahy’s future is in question. An instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, an institute of higher learning renowned for its progressive approach to education, he has just received word that he will not be teaching next semester. He strongly suspects that his dismissal has been engineered by his nemesis, the college president, who Henry believes resents his superior skills as an educator. Or perhaps he is being targeted by the government in this Cold War era, now that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt is in full swing, especially since Henry’s dedication to independent thinking is, he believes, renowned. Whatever the case, Henry Mulcahy wants justice—and vengeance—and he will not go quietly without a fight. But the battle might expose too much of Henry’s true nature . . ./divDIV Witty and biting, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe is a deliciously pointed satire of the world of higher education and its petty despots, tiny wars, and internal politics./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./divDIV/div/div

This first volume of the definitive edition of her fiction includes four novels and eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation In 1942, Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps, announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature—“mutual plagiarism,” she called it—became the hallmark of McCarthy''s fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector''s edition. The Oasis (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and The Groves of Academe (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with A Charmed Life (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers. Also included are all eight of McCarthy''s short stories, four from her collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and four collected here for the first time. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

"Mary McCarthy may be best remembered today for her novels and memoirs, but she was also a dazzling and prolific essayist and critic, known for her witty and fearless commentary on topics ranging from American realist playwrights to women''s fashion magazines, from left-wing politics to the nineteenth-century novel." "This collection, which spans her career from the 1930s to the 1970s, displays McCarthy''s acute judgment and stylistic brio. It begins with a generous selection of her drama reviews, and includes essays on Nabokov, Burroughs, Salinger, Flaubert, Calvino, Sarraute, and Tolstoy. In the essays that follow, she dissects the social and political controversies that dominated midcentury American intellectual life, from the Moscow trials to the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

DIVDIVTracing her moral struggles to the day she accidentally took a sip of water before her Communion—a mortal sin—Mary McCarthy gives us eight funny and heartrending essays about the illusive and redemptive nature of memory/divDIV “During the course of writing this, I’ve often wished that I were writing fiction.”/divDIV Originally published in large part as standalone essays in the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, Mary McCarthy’s acclaimed memoir begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918./divDIV Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religions—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. One of four children, she suffered abuse at the hands of her great-aunt and uncle until she moved to Seattle to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Early on, McCarthy lets the reader in on her secret: The chapter you just read may not be wholly reliable—facts have been distilled through the hazy lens of time and distance./divDIV In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy pays homage to the past and creates hope for the future. Reminiscent of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, this is a funny, honest, and unsparing account blessed with the holy sacraments of forgiveness, love, and redemption./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

DIVDIVThe American theatre comes alive in Mary McCarthy’s provocative anthology of essays/divDIV Her literary writings and dramatic criticism have appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles gathers together a wide-ranging collection featuring a cast of playwrights, actors, and directors that reads like a “who’s who” of American theatre. /divDIV With chapters ranging from “The Unimportance of Being Oscar” to “Odets Deplored,” this lively and witty volume opens a revealing window onto every aspect of theatre. McCarthy brings singular productions of the world’s most famous plays to vivid dramatic life while dissecting literary giants like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. She offers her controversial opinion on everything from the American school of realism as epitomized by Brando to what creates a great actress to how a badly written play can still make for good theatre./divDIV With passages on theatre figures from Shakespeare to Shaw to Ibsen and O’Neill, this is a must-have for theatre lovers and armchair critics everywhere./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

DIVDIVReading and romance, gardening tips, a farewell to a friend, even an opera retold make up this stellar collection from the bestselling author of The Group and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood/divDIV This intriguing nonfiction collection by Mary McCarthy is a cornucopia of literary delights that challenges the mind and captivates the senses./divDIV “On Rereading a Favorite Book” is McCarthy’s reaction to returning to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina after more than thirty years. In “Politics and the Novel,” she shatters a myth about the American versus European style of storytelling. Acts of reading, when consummated, are akin to “Acts of Love.” And “Saying Good-bye to Hannah” is a poignant farewell to the author of The Human Condition and, in particular, The Life of the Mind, the book Hannah Arendt saw as her crowning achievement./divDIV Whether giving us the story of La Traviata in her own words or reviewing a charming and practical book on gardening, McCarthy imbues Occasional Prose with her powerful sense of time and place. Uninhibited and uncensored, it filters the world through her unique gifts of observation and novelist’s masterful eye for detail. This is a book for anyone interested in the life of the mind—and heart. /divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

DIVDIVIn this eye-opening book, Mary McCarthy shares her love of the novel and her fear that it is becoming an endangered literary species/divDIV “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”/divDIV So begins Mary McCarthy’s fascinating critical analysis of the novel (and its practitioners) from her double-edged perspective as both reader and writer. The bestselling author of The Group takes T. S. Eliot’s quote about Henry James, written in 1918, as a jumping-off point to discuss how the novel has evolved—or not—in the last century. In this lively, erudite book, McCarthy throws down the gauntlet: Why did the nineteenth century produce novels of ideas while the twentieth century is so lacking in serious fiction? She winnows out the underachieving (read: overhyped) authors from the geniuses, explores why Jean Valjean personifies man’s conscience in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and shows how Stendhal’s The Red and the Black “illustrates the evil effects of reading.” She also tackles the role of the omniscient narrator and analogizes novels to air travel./divDIV With its exploration of authors from Balzac to D. H. Lawrence, Ideas and the Novel holds inviolate the idea of the novel as a means ultimately of liberating ideas./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

Three candid, affecting memoirs by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Group, including a National Book Award finalist. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religions—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. Early on, McCarthy lets the reader in on her secret: The chapter you just read may not be wholly reliable—facts have been distilled through the hazy lens of time and distance. How I Grew is McCarthy’s intensely personal autobiography of her life from age thirteen to twenty-one. With detail driven by an almost astonishing memory recall, the author gives us a masterful account of these formative years. From her wild adolescence—including losing her virginity at fourteen—through her eventual escape to Vassar, the bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic chronicles her relationships with family, friends, lovers, and the teachers who would influence her writing career. And Intellectual Memoirs opens with McCarthy as a married twenty-four-year-old Communist and critic. She’s disciplined, dedicated, and sexually experimental: At one point she realizes that in twenty-four hours she “had slept with three different men.” Over the course of three years, she will have had two husbands, the second being the esteemed, much older critic Edmund Wilson. It is Wilson who becomes McCarthy’s mentor and muse, urging her to try her hand at fiction. Intellectual Memoirs is a vivid snapshot of a distinctive place and time—New York in the late 1930s—and the forces that shaped Mary McCarthy’s life as a woman and a writer.

Writer Mary McCarthy''s report on the court-martial and acquittal of Captain Ernest L. Medina, U.S. Army, for his actions as commander of the troops involved in the notorious massacre at My Lai.

Seven “remarkable” stories from the bestselling author of The Group (The New York Times). Two American tourists find themselves seriously befuddled by their unorthodox Italian guide. A hospitalized graduate student turns the sounds of pain and despair into music. A family is tragically taken apart, and then reformed, by a deadly outbreak of influenza. The short fiction in this collection, some of it autobiographical in inspiration, reflects both the adept, witty storytelling and the insightful social commentary of New York Times–bestselling author Mary McCarthy. A National Book Award finalist known for such novels as Birds in America and The Groves of Academe—as well as memoir (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood) and travel writing (Venice Observed)—McCarthy shows in Cast a Cold Eye why she has been called “a brilliant writer with a rare talent for corrosive satire” (The Atlantic Monthly). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.

DIVDIVHailed as “the most provocative and disturbing analytical indictment . . . of America’s role in Vietnam” by the New York Times, this is Mary McCarthy’s riveting account of her journeys to Saigon and Hanoi /divDIV In 1967, the editor of the New York Review of Books sent Mary McCarthy to Vietnam. In this daring and incisive account, McCarthy brings her critical thinking and novelist’s eye to one of the most unpopular wars in our nation’s history./divDIV Outraged over America’s role in the Vietnam War, McCarthy arrived in Saigon with her own preconceived notions. Her time there did little to alter those beliefs. Focusing on the moral consequences—“the worst thing that could happen to our country would be to win this war”—McCarthy provides firsthand reports from the front line. She describes visits to villages built for Vietnamese refugees torn between the terror that Americans would stay and the fear that they would go./divDIV From its coverage of the daily horrors of war to notes on the logistical challenge of bringing 494,000 soldiers home, this is a timely and timeless work from one of America’s most outspoken and respected critics./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

Candid, sharp, and entertaining essays from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and a “delightfully polished writer” (The Atlantic Monthly). Whether penning criticism, memoir, or fiction, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Group invariably wrote with “an icily honest eye and a glacial wit” (The New York Times). Gathered here are two memorable collections: theatrical critiques and opinion pieces. Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1962: McCarthy weighs in on Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller with candor, penetrating insight, and wit. On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 1946–1961: McCarthy expresses her frank, unflinching, often contrarian point of view in these provocative essays addressing everything from fashion to fiction, the human condition, religion, sex, Arthur Miller’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, Charles Dickens, and Gandhi.

A penetrating work of reportage on Venice. "Searching observations and astonishing comprehension of the Venetian taste and character" (New York Herald Tribune).

A writer’s life is upended by her destructive ex-husband in this intensely personal novel by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Group. Former actress and budding playwright Martha Sinnott longs to recapture the “charmed life” she abandoned when she divorced her first husband. So she returns to her beloved New England artists’ colony with her second husband—and discovers that little has changed. The same people make up the same tightly knit society. Nevertheless, her eagerly anticipated homecoming does include some rude awakenings. Martha’s arrogant ex, Miles, is dangerously close by, living with his new wife. The people Martha once counted among her closest friends have become also-rans and never-weres, unhappy and often resentful. And in this pervasive atmosphere of falsehoods and self-delusions, the biggest lie of all is Martha’s belief that her reunion with Miles won’t somehow wreak terrible havoc on all she holds dear. A New York Times bestseller by an author with “an icily honest eye and a glacial wit that make her portraits stingingly memorable,” A Charmed Life is a smart, mesmerizing portrait of love, marriage, and deception (The New York Times). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.

DIVDIVIn this no-holds-barred memoir with a foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick, the bestselling author of The Group recalls her early life in New York, revealing the genesis of and genius behind her groundbreaking fiction /divDIV Mary McCarthy is a married twenty-four-year-old Communist and critic when this memoir begins. She’s disciplined, dedicated, and sexually experimental: At one point she realizes that in twenty-four hours she “had slept with three different men.” But she believes in the institution of marriage. Over the course of three years, she will have had two husbands, the second being the esteemed, much older critic Edmund Wilson. It is Wilson who becomes McCarthy’s mentor and muse, urging her to try her hand at fiction./divDIV McCarthy’s powers of observation are on witty display here, as the seventy-something writer recalls events that took place half a century earlier. Her eye for the revealing detail will be recognized by readers of her novels as she describes marching in May Day parades, attending parties for the Scottsboro Boys, and witnessing firsthand the American left wing’s response to the Moscow trials and the Spanish Civil War./divDIV Picking up where How I Grew left off and unfinished at the time of her death in 1989, Intellectual Memoirs is a vivid snapshot of a distinctive place and time—New York in the late 1930s—and the forces that shaped Mary McCarthy’s life as a woman and a writer./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

The electrifying portrait of an idealistic young man who is an unwilling witness to the changes in society and its values. Here is a book that captures the very essence of the 1960s and is at the same time as fresh today as when it was first published in 1965.

DIVDIVFrom Madame Bovary to Macbeth, this collection by Mary McCarthy offers surprising revelations about some of the world’s most beloved works/divDIV Shakespeare, Nabokov, Orwell, and Burroughs are just a few of the literary immortals featured in this engaging and thought-provoking volume./divDIV In one remarkable essay, McCarthy provides a lively discourse on the true nature of evil in Shakespeare’s plays. Focusing on the character of Macbeth, she reveals why Lady Macbeth, who has to “unsex herself” and “wear the pants,” is the more human of the two. She tells us why the often-overlooked character of Madame Bovary’s husband, Charles, is the true hero, and not Emma Bovary, whom Flaubert once famously said was himself. Also included here is McCarthy’s impassioned defense of Hannah Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem, as well as a discussion of the reactionary leftist writers, and a look at why J. D. Salinger was the obvious successor to Hemingway./divDIV Distinguished by McCarthy’s savage intelligence, clarity of thought, and utter lack of pretension, The Writing on the Wall is a timeless gem from an author who reveres the written word./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

Open your eyes. Open your mind. Open your imagination. Look! What do you see? Mary McCarthy''s beautiful handmade-paper collages will transport young children on a journey of discovery.

The news felt like a punch in the gut. I cried in disbelief as the doctor told me what they found. In the blink of an eye, my world turned upside down. My husband brought me to the Emergency Room after I experienced a seizure. The hospital staff did scans, tests, and a biopsy, and now the doctor told me I had an inoperable brain tumor. The name of my nemesis was Oligoastrocytoma, Grade 3. My husband and I used the CaringBridge website to keep family and friends informed on how I was doing. A Pilgrimage of Hope, A Story of Faith and Medicine, is my story chronicling the challenges in trying to triumph in the battle for my life. The memoirs capture the frightening details in a crash course with cancer and the possible treatments for this disease. Despite the cancer diagnosis, I found myself being called closer to God. I wanted to share my physical and spiritual journey with others so that when they are challenged, they will have some guidance in how to respond. With recovery in mind, my spiritual growth deepened as I aligned my will with the will of God. A pilgrimage to the Holy Land at the end of my treatments fulfilled my yearning for a greater understanding of Christ. I shared the details of my trip to the Holy Land on my CaringBridge site and in this book.

Three brilliant novels from a #1 New York Times–bestselling author. Navigating friendship, sex, careers, and the challenges of adulthood, the characters of Mary McCarthy’s novels remain instantly relatable, whether they’re living in 1930s New York City or 1960s Paris. Here, three of her most outstanding works are collected in one volume. The Group: This “witty . . . brilliant” blockbuster bestseller follows eight privileged girls from their youthful friendship at Vassar through their complicated journeys into womanhood (Cosmopolitan). The Company She Keeps: A “clever, witty, polished” novel about a young bohemian’s daring political and romantic explorations among an intellectual Manhattan social circle (TheNew York Times). Birds of America: In 1964, a shy young student and birdwatcher arrives in Paris to study at the Sorbonne and finds himself disoriented by the rapidly changing world around him. This “endlessly fascinating novel” (San Francisco Chronicle) is “in the same class as Henry James’s The American and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer” (Esquire). Known for her satirical wit and blending of autobiographical detail from her own colorful life into her fiction, McCarthy was a literary icon whose books provide a rich glimpse of mid-twentieth-century America and a psychologically astute, timeless reading experience.

Captivating portraits of two of the world’s most beguiling cities from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Group. Mary McCarthy blends art, politics, religion, music, and history to create unique living portraits of two of Italy’s most enchanting cities in these enthralling books now available in one volume. The Stones of Florence: The book Library Journal called “Mary McCarthy’s classic” takes readers on a timeless journey to the place where the Renaissance began. From Michelangelo to the Medicis, The Stones of Florence is McCarthy’s hymn to this immortal hub of art and commerce. Venice Observed: McCarthy trains her gaze on the immortal City of Canals. At once a comprehensive travelogue and a powerful piece of reportage, Venice Observed contains “searching observations and astonishing comprehension of the Venetian taste and character” (New York Herald Tribune).

DIVDIVMary McCarthy, one of our most brilliant and beloved authors, serves up wit, insight, and her unique worldview in this diverse collection of essays/divDIV In provocatively titled pieces such as “The Contagion of Ideas,” “Tyranny of the Orgasm,” and “No News, or,What Killed the Dog,” Mary McCarthy expresses her frank, unflinching, often contrarian point of view./divDIV Nothing—and no one—is safe from her merciless writer’s eye—from politics to the ever-changing social scene to the strengths and weaknesses of her native country, where she believes “passivity and not aggressiveness is the dominant trait of the American character.” On the Contrary also features a cast of memorable characters. In “Naming Names,” Arthur Miller’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee results in an indictment for contempt of Congress. McCarthy reviews The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt’s breakthrough book, and despairs of finding a “really American place” to take a visiting existentialist—a thinly disguised Simone de Beauvoir? /divDIV From Dickens to Gandhi to the Kinsey Reports, with pithy and wide-ranging articles on everything from fashion to fiction, the human condition, religion, and sex, On the Contrary raises controversial questions to which, even today, there are no easy answers./div This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate. /div

A collection of three novels by the author who transformed the scope and style of twentieth-century American literature—including the landmark classic The Group In Mary McCarthy''s most famous novel, The Group (1963), she depicts the lives of eight Vassar College graduates during the 1930s as they grapple with sex, sexism, money, motherhood, and family. McCarthy''s final two novels—Birds of America (1971), a coming of age tale of 19-year-old Peter Levi, who travels to Europe during the 1960s, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a thriller about a group of passengers taken hostage on an airplane by militant hijackers—are both concerned with the state of modern society, from the cross-currents of radical social change to the psychology of terrorism. As a special feature, this second volume contains McCarthy''s 1979 essay "The Novels that Got Away," on her unfinished fiction. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Spirited and insightful essays from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and a “delightfully polished writer” (The Atlantic Monthly). Whether penning criticism, memoir, or fiction, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Group invariably wrote with “an icily honest eye and a glacial wit” (The New York Times). Gathered here are three collections of her personal essays and literary criticism. Occasional Prose: McCarthy imbues this collection with her unique gifts of clear-eyed observation, sharp insight, and heartfelt passion as she gives us the story of La Traviata in her own words, reviews a charming and practical book on gardening, revisits Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and eulogizes friends, including Hannah Arendt. “Bracing opinions tartly expressed . . . May she continue to call us all to attention . . . showing us the world of her imagination, thought and rich experience.” —The New York Times The Writing on the Wall: With engaging and thought-provoking essays on Madame Bovary, Macbeth, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, William S. Burroughs, J. D. Salinger, and Hannah Arendt, this collection of literary reactions is distinguished by McCarthy’s savage intelligence, clarity of thought, and utter lack of pretension. “The brand name tells all. Potential readers do not have to be informed by me of the excellence of this volume—the acumen, intelligence, clarity, wit and lack of bitchiness.” —Anthony Burgess, The New York Times Ideas and the Novel: In this lively, erudite book, McCarthy throws down the gauntlet: Why did the nineteenth century produce novels of ideas while the twentieth century is so lacking in serious fiction? Could Henry James be a big part of the problem? With verve and passion, McCarthy provides a critique of how the novel has evolved—or not—in the last century. “[McCarthy’s] writing is spirited. [Her] musings serve a larger purpose, make a grander statement, or rather, indictment. She means to set the modern novel apart.” —The Harvard Crimson

"Her prose is economical without being austere, witty without extravagance, tense and dramatic in its development from sentence to paragraph, clean as a chime...Her intelligence and learning are dazzling." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times