The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

A collection of the New Yorker critic’s finest essays, which examine the books that reveal and record our world.

Joan Acocella was “one of our finest cultural critics” (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote i...