{"title":"Arthur Krystal","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"culture-we-deserve-book-jacques-barzun-9780819562371","title":"The Culture We Deserve","description":"Twelve essays exploring aspects of literacy and art criticism, retrospective sociology and the effects of relativism on moral behavior.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49565189406993,"sku":"CIN0819562378G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49611623268625,"sku":"GOR002784548","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50215451197713,"sku":"CIN0819562378A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50228384596241,"sku":"CIN0819562378VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0819562378.jpg?v=1751139262"},{"product_id":"half-life-of-an-american-essayist-book-arthur-krystal-9781567923285","title":"The Half-Life of an American Essayist","description":"The twelve essays in The Half-Life-the title is from Goethe's Experience is only half of experience-go deeper than the standard book piece; they hew to the line first drawn by Montaigne and later extended by Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Woolf and Orwell. Although there may be no preordained way of writing about literature, Krystal takes his cue from Edwin Denby, who maintained that the first duty of the critic is to be interesting. No matter how large the subject-whether it is the history of boxing or the growth of the Holocaust industry, Krystal paints broad subjects with precise brushstrokes. Erudite and informative, his essays are still accessible to the general reader. The reason is simple: as Dr. Johnson noted, What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. To this one might add that there is satisfaction to be had in the effort itself. How else could one write as committedly and entertainingly about Paul Valery's Cahiers as about Joe Louis's left jab?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49610069934353,"sku":"GOR009460066","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50382719025425,"sku":"CIN1567923283G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51417269272849,"sku":"CIN1567923283VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52686035616017,"sku":"NLS9781567923285","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1567923283.jpg?v=1750861683"},{"product_id":"agitations-book-arthur-krystal-9780300092165","title":"Agitations","description":"From small questions of taste to large questions concerning the nature of existence, intellectual debate takes up much of our time. In this work literary critic Arthur Krystal examines what most commentators ignore: the role of temperament and taste in the forming of aesthetic and ideological opinions. In provocative essays about reading and writing, about the relation between life and literature, about knowledge and certainty, about God and death, and about his own gradual disaffection with the literary scene, Krystal demonstrates that opposing points of view are based more on innate predilections than on disinterested thought or analysis. Not beholden to any fashionable theory or political agenda, Krystal interrogates the usual suspects in the cultural wars from an independent, though not impartial, vantage point. Clearly personal and unabashedly belletrist, his essays ask important questions. What makes culture one thing and not another? What inspires aesthetic values? What drives us to make comparisons? And how does a bias for one kind of evidence as opposed to another contribute to the form and content of intellectual argument?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346664263953,"sku":"CIN0300092164G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300092164.jpg?v=1751005720"},{"product_id":"some-unfinished-chaos-book-arthur-krystal-9780813950617","title":"Some Unfinished Chaos","description":"While so many literary artists of earlier eras fall away, F. Scott Fitzgerald retains a hold on us, both through his work and through his life. There is something inscrutable in him, a fact he recognized himself and which New Yorker writer Arthur Krystal takes head-on in a biography that gives us the life—from a Minnesota upbringing to the most iconic rise and fall in American letters—but leaves the minutiae behind in search of a more penetrating analysis.  The Great Gatsby author was obsessed with measuring himself against an unforgiving panoply of artistic and material standards, resulting in a constantly shifting sense of himself—half triumphant, half shattered. Some Unfinished Chaos delivers, at last, a nuanced portrait—in Krystal’s words, a layering of impressions—of a man who knew the rhythms and passions of his society, and who set it down in his imperishable stories while remaining a mystery even to himself.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363669152017,"sku":"CIN0813950619VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50618269860113,"sku":"CIN0813950619G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008118718737,"sku":"NIN9780813950617","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813950619.jpg?v=1763479626"},{"product_id":"word-or-two-before-i-go-book-arthur-krystal-9780813950624","title":"A Word or Two Before I Go","description":"Lauded by the critics Dana Gioia, Morris Dickstein, Edward Mendelson, Christopher Hitchens, Joseph Epstein, and Michael Dirda alike, Arthur Krystal has written for publications as varied as Harper’s, the New Criterion, Raritan, the American Scholar, and Sports Illustrated. In characteristically lucid prose, Krystal offers here—if he is to be believed—his last collection. These eleven essays and one evocative story range in subject matter from the depredations of aging and the anomalies of cultural appropriation to the friendship between Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling and the day Muhammad Ali punched Krystal in the face.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363672953105,"sku":"CIN0813950627VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50630674284817,"sku":"NGR9780813950624","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008105611537,"sku":"NIN9780813950624","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813950627.jpg?v=1763479785"},{"product_id":"except-when-i-write-book-arthur-krystal-9780190494360","title":"Except When I Write","description":"From Montaigne in the sixteenth century to Orwell, Eliot, and Trilling in the twentieth, the best literary essayists combine a gift for observation with an abiding commitment to books. Although it may seem that books are becoming less essential and that a revolution in sensibility is taking place, the essays of Arthur Krystal suggest otherwise. Companionable without being chummy, engaged without being didactic, erudite without being stuffy, he demonstrates that literature, even in the digital age, remains the truest expression of the human condition.  Covering subjects as diverse as aphorisms, dueling, the night, and the 1960s, the essays gathered here offer the common reader uncommon pleasure. In prose that is both vibrant and elegant, Krystal negotiates among myriad subjects-from historical writing as exemplified by Jacques Barzun to the art of screenwriting as not so happily represented by F. Scott Fitzgerald. His cardinal rule as a writer? William Hazlitt's \"Confound it, man, don't be insipid.\" No fear of that. Except When I Write is thoughtful in the most joyful sense--brimming with ideas in order to give us the flow and cadence of someone actually thinking.  Keenly observant and death on pretension, Krystal examines the world of books without ever losing sight of the world beyond them. Literature may be the bedrock on which these essays rest, but as F. R. Leavis aptly noted, \"One cannot seriously be interested in literature and remain purely literary in interests.\" Except When I Write is a reminder of both the pleasure and the power of a well-tuned essay.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50465450361105,"sku":"GOR013781597","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999634362641,"sku":"NIN9780190494360","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52488717762833,"sku":"NLS9780190494360","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0190494360.jpg?v=1751323421"},{"product_id":"this-thing-we-call-literature-book-arthur-krystal-9780190272371","title":"This Thing We Call Literature","description":"In his fourth book of essays, acclaimed cultural critic Arthur Krystal surveys the world of letters in its academic, literary, and populist incarnations--just to make sure those divisions still apply. What he finds is that the ground has shifted. With Lionel Trilling at his back, Krystal casts a cold eye on contemporary culture and discerns a lack of discrimination between the truly great and the merely good, and the fairly good and just plain bad. Critical but not angst-ridden, he deplores tunnel vision on both sides of the culture wars. Presumptive cultural boundaries have no place here. Krystal admires Bob Dylan and Elmore Leonard without including them in a purely literary pantheon. He endorses the Great Books without necessarily voting the Republican ticket. In essays about the meaning of the novel, the role of music in poetry, genre fiction vs. literary fiction, the contributions of the superlative critic Erich Auerbach, and the strange alliance of neurology and aesthetics, as well as in lighter pieces about reviewing and list-making, Krystal brings his own brand of discriminating intelligence to a spectrum of received opinions whose flaws and cracks otherwise go unnoticed.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50789283102993,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50789283987729,"sku":"GOR014072961","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52488712159505,"sku":"NLS9780190272371","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52739722576145,"sku":"CIN0190272376LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53569641283857,"sku":"CIN0190272376G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0190272376.jpg?v=1751005067"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-arthur-krystal.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}