A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful mind in a beautiful book
Review: Mary McCarthy is one of the most important American thinkers of the twentieth century, and she was at the heart of everything in the New York worlds of politics and letters. This superb collection of her essays shows her at her shrewdest, on subjects ranging from Eugene O'Neill to fashion magazines to Portugal to society and political figures. Famous for her unrelentingly flinty lordliness (memorably and mercilessly caricatured in Randall Jarrell's PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION), she can be savage in her reviews. When her stinging rebukes are deserved, as in her famous withering critique of Salinger's FRANNY AND ZOOEY, they're a delight, but even when you feel they're unwarranted or off-target they're still instructive and illuminating, and are always written with incredible elegance and eloquence. We want the best of the best critics to show, more than anything, a point of view, which McCarthy undoubtedly does: a point of view that is Europhilic, intelligent, self-important, funny, biting, and exceptionally articulate.

This collection is an absolutely beautiful hardcover edition from NYRB that is as delightful to the touch as to the eye. It is an extremely worthy investment.