This is a magical book. Maybe that is all I need to say about it to persuade you to read it—even to STUDY IT--to see how it achieves its magic. That is what I would do—study it—if I felt I could take the time. But the list of great books is long. Life is short (especially at my age). And now I want to move on to read Joan Acocella's other books (including the textbook she co-authored on abnormal psychology!) besides this one, the first of hers I have read from cover to cover.

I hope then that one word—MAGICAL—will be enough to get you to pay attention to what Joan Acocella says in *this* book about art, life, and thought. (Or, if you need further persuasion, you could read her beautiful obituary by Richard Sandomir that appeared in the January 24, 2024, issue of the New York Times.)

But maybe you are not persuaded when a total stranger you have never heard of, much less met, who does not even reveal his real name, simply tells you that you MUST read this book. For you, then, I will try to provide evidence for asserting that you MUST read this book.

I guess I need now to assure you I am not related to Acocella. I never met her. I have never met anyone who met her or knew her. I never even was in the same room as her.

I guess I also must acknowledge you may think “this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” To that I say Joan Acocella certainly knows what *she* is talking about. So stop reading me. READ HER.

The twenty-four essays in this book are presented in chronological order of publication, except for the title essay, which I think comes first not just because the essay’s title makes an eye-catching title for a book, but also because—for me, at least—the essay itself is a nice introduction to what Acocella does in the essays that follow.

What makes the book magical for me is the variety of ways you can read it. Yes, you can read the essays in chronological order, as I did. But now that I have finished the book, I can see that the essays might even be more rewarding to read in groups.

Group A: essays on works that will be with us (for better or worse) forever: Dracula, Gibran, Grimm’s fairytales, Book of Job, Beowulf (in JRR Tolkien’s unpublished translation), Little Women, Gilgamesh, Letters of Pliny the Younger.
Group B: essays--on a diverse array of famous creative people—that “shuttle back and forth between the artist’s life and his/her art” and show us why it is “exciting to watch these people, most of them young, with no money and no prospects, find their way into art.”
Group C: essays on dictionaries and dirty words.

Or you could group them this way:
Group A as above; but then
B: essays on books for children of any age—Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Little Women, My Dog Tulip by JD Ackerley (whom I regret I had never heard of until reading about him here); children’s books by Gianni Rodari (another writer I regret I had never heard of);
C: essays about--let’s call them--entertainers: Agatha Christie (based on Acocella’s reading of all 66 of Christie’s detective novels!); Richard Pryor, Elmore Leonard, Graham Greene;
D: essays about varieties of feminism: Marilynne Robinson, Elena Ferrante, Angela Carter, Louisa May Alcott, Natalia Ginzburg;
E: essays about famously and/or notoriously eccentric creators: Gibran, Evelyn Waugh, Angela Carter, Edward Gorey, Andy Warhol, Frances Bacon.

I can think of other ways these essays can be grouped, for instance, on religion; on writers who were first published in Italian; on visual artists, but you get the idea.

Read chronologically, the book is an engaging, insightful, thought-provoking, always witty kind of variety show (you probably can think of a better metaphor) of criticism at its best: balanced and inspiring, essays that make you want to read the book being reviewed and maybe even learn more about the essay’s subject.

Read in groups like those above (or groups of your own design) the book will still have all the qualities just mentioned AND you will see how these essays—written years apart and prompted only by the appearance of new books to review—connect to each other. And when you see that, you might well feel, as I do, that you have witnessed magic. You perhaps will see, as I do, why these particular subjects must have had particular appeal to this brilliant critic, and why she is able to make them—and this book—magically appealing to you, too.

And this is where the one “unchronological” essay comes in and the other reason why I think it is appropriate as a title for the book. I don’t mean to imply that Acocella is like Dracula. But her method in all these essays bears a similarity to his: extract the essence of a subject to achieve a feeling of fullness [in the reader!].

Anyway, no matter how you read the book—AND YOU SHOULD—you will be dazzled by Acocella’s magical turns of phrase. Here are a few (okay, too many) that I especially liked:
• The English upper and upper-middle classes in the years surrounding the First and Second World Wars. . . were not as nice as we are, and they were much funnier.
• [Gibran’s The Prophet is a book] with margins you could drive a truck through—a selling point not to be dismissed.
• With Christie we are dealing not so much with a literary figure as with a broad cultural phenomenon like Barbie or the Beatles.
• Presumably as your child is nodding off you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of patriarchy.
• This seems a perfect example of psychoanalytic critics’ habitual indifference to the obvious
• The reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is.
• God, not Job, is the star of the book, and though he is not loving or fair that is part of the attraction.
• Robinson writes about religion two ways. One is meliorist, reformist. The other is rapturous, visionary. Many people have been good at the first kind; few, today, at the second kind. The second kind is Robinson’s forte.
• Pryor would not toe the line, any line, and we should honor him for this.
• It is the exploration of women’s mental underworld that makes [Ferrante’s Neapolitan series] so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed in all literature
• Not all of [Elmore Leonard’s novels] are on this level [of greatness], but five or six of them are, plus parts of many others. That’s a lot.
• There’s not a dirty joke in the world that he doesn’t think is funny.
• She was young, and she had only a few years of absolutely first-rank work, but that is true of many writers, including some of the greatest.
• Her father, Bronson Alcott, was an intellectual, or, in any case, a man who had thoughts.
• [Little Women] is not so much a novel, in the Henry James sense of the term, as a sort of wad of themes and scenes and cultural wishes. It is more like the Mahabharata or the Old Testament than it is like a novel. And that makes it an extraordinary novel.
• Something can suddenly appear in our lives—blood on the carpet, a letter without a return address—and after that nothing is ever the same.
• As regards eccentricity, funny how certain artists are that way. Don’t let this biographer loose on Gogol.
• Chalk it up to the culture wars and maybe also a concern for the bottom line, plus our old friend bad taste.
• This theme, of the blindness of European Jewish families to the actual mortal threat of the Fascists, has been sounded before, but rarely with such flair.
• Charles Darwin put forth a theory suggesting that human beings might be descended from lower animals, things with fur.
• With what must be the most robust erection in world literature …
• Before that the two young men were killing monsters and having sex—not such a different plotline from that of a modern action movie.
• The other day I tried to buy Tales Told by a Machine, from 1976. Amazon had a hardcover copy, for $967. This is a crime against art.
• Basically, anytime an organization needed someone to go, expenses paid, to a country that had crocodiles, [Graham Greene] was interested.
• After the Second World War, the Catholic Church would provide a suitably august arena for the transition to another sort of religion: doubt, anxiety, existentialism.
• In the twentieth century pity was hard to write about. That this dark-hearted man [Graham Greene] managed to—even that he tried—is surely a jewel in his crown.
• He [Francis Bacon] was not a discreet man, bless him, and his daily routine was widely known.

Such a sharp critical voice, one that will be missed. I know the author's work on dance, but this collection of essays (mostly) on literature is thoughtful and articulate.

As someone who had a New Yorker subscription for a year, and yet would often find myself ignoring the long-reads, articles, and reviews to instead flick straight to the crossword, it was a strange pleasure to learn that I had been missing out: these essays (lifted predominantly from the New Yorker, although a couple also borrowed from the New York Review of Books) were an absolute delight - sharply observant, well-researched, and fun. Like most collections centred around art or literature, the most enjoyable were those featuring those I was already familiar with - the essays on Dracula, Richard Pryor, and Elena Ferrante, for example - and yet Acocella was also able to make that which seemed uninteresting or insignificant (e.g. prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries) equally compelling. And each essay was the perfect, bite-sized length; slim enough to read in a single sitting, without ever feeling rushed or cut short.

Perhaps stemming from my own ignorance (aka my skewed interest in crosswords over the New Yorker's actual content), I think I would have appreciated a little more information about Acocella herself - although I really appreciated her clean, critical style across the essays, it would have interesting to learn about her life and career in the introduction - by the end of the book, I felt myself wondering how she had come to be so knowledgeable about such a wide array of different subjects.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC ebook - I really loved reading this, and will be strongly recommending it!

An electric collection of essays from an eminent cultural critic. Acocella sits with their finger on the pulse of the literary world, cutting through to the heart of topics in prose that is impossible to diminish.