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Antiquities and Other Stories

On sale

14th April 2022

Price: £9.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781474623742

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‘A strange and compelling new book from one of America’s greatest living authors’ Times Literary Supplement

‘As cunning and rich as anything Ozick’s written’ Wall Street Journal

‘One of our era’s central writers. About a man ensnared by history, Antiquities is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are’ The New Yorker

‘Ozick’s prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave’ New York Review of Books

I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing.

In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie returns as a Trustee to the long-defunct boarding school that he attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir about the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school, about his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, about the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil.

In this novella, and the three stories published alongside it, one of our most preeminent writers weaves together myth and mania, history and illusion to capture the shifting meanings of the past.

Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Beguiling. Ozick is adept at capturing the vicissitudes of fading memory or flashes of lucid insight. A fascinating portrait of isolation, memory, and loss
The New York Times
One of the greatest fiction writers and critics alive today
Harold Bloom
Unequaled in her generation
O, the Oprah Magazine
A literary national treasure returns with a textured, gripping tale that peels back layers of antisemitism, with echoes of both A Separate Peace and the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer
John Sutherland, New York Times Book Review
The most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our times
Time Out
One of America's most important and inventive writers
Ali Smith
She is a writer innately drawn to paradox, and to the moral questions inherent in the relationships between richness and poverty, mind and body, history and imagination
Guardian
A genuinely brilliant modern writer