Annal:1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

Making Waves

Mario Vargas Llosa, John King

• 1997 NBCC–Criticism winner
• Score: 10.47

Spanning thirty years of writing, these essays trace the development of Mario Vargas Llosa’s thinking on politics and culture, and show the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, the terrorism of Peru’s Shining Path, and the presidency of Alberto Fujimoro; brilliant engagements with such towering figures of twentieth-century literature as Joyce, Faulkner, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Bellows; considerations on the dog cemetery where Rin-Tin-Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt’s knife, and the failures of the English public-school system, which made Vargas Llosa’s son into a Rastafarian. This collection reminds us “that literature is fire, that it means nonconformity and rebellion… [that it] is a form of permanent insurrection.” Making Waves superbly exemplifies Vargas Llosa’s artistic credo.

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Helen Vendler

• 1997 NBCC–Criticism finalist
• Score: 6.47

Helen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language.

In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. The commentaries—presented alongside the original and modernized texts—offer fresh perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare’s techniques as a working poet. With the help of Vendler’s acute eye, we gain an appreciation of “Shakespeare’s elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent.”

Vendler’s understanding of the sonnets informs her readings on an accompanying compact disk, which is bound with the book. This recorded presentation…

God and the American Writer

Alfred Kazin

• 1997 NBCC–Criticism finalist
• Score: 6.47

This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature. Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery subjects: what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War—so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America.

An enthralling book by a major writer.

The End of the Novel of Love

Vivian Gornick

• 1997 NBCC–Criticism finalist
• Score: 6.47

In this book of new and collected critical essays, Vivian Gornick turns the searching intelligence and honesty of insight that mark her memoirs on the work—and the lives—of writers she admires, among them Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Christina Stead, and George Meredith. In doing so, she examines a century of novels of love-in-the-Western-world and comes to see that, for most writers, it is the drama of our angry and frightened selves in the presence of love that is our modern preoccupation.

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century

John Brewer

• 1997 NBCC–Criticism finalist
• Score: 6.47

John Brewer’s landmark book shows us how English artists, amateurs, entrepreneurs, and audiences developed a culture that is still celebrated for its wit and brilliance. Brewer’s purpose is to show how literature, painting, music, and the theater related to a public increasingly avid for them; how artists used, or were used by, publishers, plagiarists, impresarios, and managers; and how contemporary ideas of taste combined with patriotic fervor and shrewdly managed commerce to create a vibrant, dynamic national culture. In Brewer’s transforming analysis, we see revealed a picture of English eighteenth-century art and literature that is less familiar but more surprising, more various, and more convincing than any we have seen before.