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Maestros & Monsters
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status-Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term "intellectual," whose famous 1965 essay "Notes on Camp" won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at The New Yorker. To know Sontag and Steiner, as this memoir suggests, was often to feel overmatched and yet also bemused and awe-struck. Both of them gave off an air of omniscience and self-confidence, as if they had taken to heart the words of the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote, "I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me." Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions-the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others.
- About The Author
- Robert Boyers, born in Brooklyn NY in 1842 and educated at Queens College of the City of New York (BA 1963) and New York University (MA 1965), founded Salmagundi, an international quarterly, in 1965 and continues to edit the journal, to teach at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and to direct the New York Sate Summer Writers Institute, which he founded in 1987. Boyers is the author of hundreds of periodical essays and reviews in publications such as The New Republic, Dissent, Partisan Review, Harpers, Granta, The Times Literary Supplement, among many other literary and political magazines. He is also the author of a dozen books, most recently, The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies. His other books include The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, The Dictator's Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists, and a volume of short stories, Excitable Women, Damaged Men. In 2009 he edited and wrote the introduction for George Steiner at The New Yorker, a volume that has been published in more than twenty languages.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9781942134886
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Mandel Vilar Press, (09 November 2023)
- Number of Pages
- 256
- Weight
- 392 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 229 x 152 x 25 mm
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