Antiquities and Other Stories
‘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.
‘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.
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Reviews
Beguiling. Ozick is adept at capturing the vicissitudes of fading memory or flashes of lucid insight. A fascinating portrait of isolation, memory, and loss
One of the greatest fiction writers and critics alive today
Unequaled in her generation
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
The most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our times
One of America's most important and inventive writers
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
A genuinely brilliant modern writer
