Description
Very Good+ dust jacket with author’s photo on back panel. Light soiling at edges. A mylar dust jacket has been added. Very Good+ binding is gray paper over boards, white cloth-backed. Letter ‘CJ’ on front cover in silver, silver lettering on spine. Light soiling to edges, corners slightly bumped. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 9.5″ tall x 6.7″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
For the last fifteen years, the brilliant and irreverent Clive James has been one of England’s most respected critics of literature, television, culture-his work best known to us through its appearance in the New York Review of Books. Here is his first collection to be published in the United States: an extensive selection of critical essays from the past decade, many of them on American subjects, that will confirm for the American reader the special pleasure of listening to his eclectic and singular critical voice.
Clive James is a propagandist of the first-rate and a gadfly of the pretentious and overpraised, his range of interest encompassing the highest bastions of culture and the lowest common denominators. He writes of important modern poets-Auden (“I can still remember those unlucky hands… one of them had refurbished the language”), Berryman, Roethke, Lowell-and of giants like Solzhenitsyn and Lawrence. And he pays certain lesser literary figures no less attention: his piece on Lillian Hellman is entitled “It Is of a Windiness,'” and of Raymond Chandler he says: “He had an ear for depth–he could detect incipient permanence in what sounded superficially like ephemera.” His view of both Norman Mailer and Marilyn Monroe (“Mailer’s Marilyn”) is wickedly brilliant: his slant on the Sherlockologists, demolishing. And then there are his TV reviews television column of the London Observer), written in the voice of the unabashed, yet skeptical, addict: “Tolstoy Makes Television History,” “Anne and Mark Get Married” Hi! I’m Liza, “Mission Unspeakable,” while in an affection. lately barbed essay called “Drained Crystals”, James explains his love of Star Trek. One of the most moving essays in the book, “The Metropolitan Critic,” takes Edmund Wilson as its subject, and, indeed, James, in sensibility and spirit, is reminiscent of Wilson in his New Yorker days. James’s rambunctious and proved. five tone, his humor and clear intelligence, his capacity for profound appreciation. make First Reactions a book to be read and read again: for the ideas it imparts, and
for pure pleasure.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
Born in Australia in 1930. Clive James emigrated in 2962 to England, where he attended Cambridge Aside from his critical work, James writes poetry several volumes of which have been published in England and some lyrics most of which have been recorded). He has written for television, and since 1970 has been the television critic for the Observer. He divides his time between London and Cambridge.
