Cynthia Ozick
Encyclopedia
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. She is the niece of the Hebraist
Hebraist
A Hebraist is a specialist in Hebrew and Hebraic studies. Specifically, British and German scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries who were involved in the study of Hebrew language and literature were commonly known by this designation, at a time when Hebrew was little understood outside practicing...

 Abraham Regelson
Abraham Regelson
Abraham Regelson was a Hebrew poet, author, children's author, translator, and editor.-Biography:Abraham Regelson was born in Hlusk, now Belarus, in the Russian Empire in 1896, and died at his home in Neveh Monossohn, Israel in 1981...

.

Background

Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Russian-born parents, Celia (Regelson) and William Ozick, proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. As a girl, Ozick helped to deliver prescriptions. In Ozick's biography Growing up in the Bronx, she remembers stones thrown at her and being called a Christ-killer as she ran past the two churches in her neighborhood. In school she was publicly shamed for refusing to sing Christmas carols. She earned her B.A. from New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

 and went on to study English Literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 at Ohio State University
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...

, where she completed an M.A.

Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American
American Jews
American Jews, also known as Jewish Americans, are American citizens of the Jewish faith or Jewish ethnicity. The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe, and their U.S.-born descendants...

 life, but she also writes on a broad range of topics including politics, history, and literary criticism. In addition, she has written and translated poetry.

Her novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), called The Bear Boy in the United Kingdom, received much praise in the literary press. The Din in the Head is her sixth collection of literary essays. In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story
Rea Award for the Short Story
The Rea Award for the Short Story is an annual award given to a living American or Canadian author chosen for unusually significant contributions to short story fiction.-The Award:...

. In 2000, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....

 for Quarrel & Quandary. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize
Man Booker International Prize
The Man Booker International Prize is a biennial international literary award given to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation....

, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award
PEN/Malamud Award
The PEN/Malamud Award and Memorial Reading honors "excellence in the art of the short story", and is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. The selection committee is composed of PEN/Faulkner directors and representatives of Bernard Malamud's literary executors.The award was first given...

 established by Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford...

’s family to honor excellence in the art of the short story. Critically acclaimed novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...

 called Ozick one of the greatest living American writers.

Novels

  • Trust (1966)
  • The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)
  • The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)
  • The Puttermesser Papers
    The Puttermesser Papers
    The Puttermesser Papers is a novel written by Cynthia Ozick. It was published in 1997. It could also be considered a collection of short stories, as each of the five "chapters" were published previously in various magazines before being brought together as this book; however, the book has the...

     (1997)
  • Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) -- (published in the United Kingdom as The Bear Boy (2005)
  • Foreign Bodies (2010)

Shorter Fiction

  • The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories
    The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories
    The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories is the second book and first collection of stories published by American author Cynthia Ozick. "The Pagan Rabbi" and "Envy, or Yittish in America" along with an interview of the author were lator collected as an audio book in 1989 read by Ron Rifkin and Mitchell...

     (1971)
  • Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)
  • Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)
  • Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1989)
  • The Shawl
    The Shawl (Ozick Novel)
    The Shawl is a story collection consisting of a short story and a novella by Cynthia Ozick. Published in 1989, the book consists of two separately published yet connected stories, "The Shawl" and "Rosa".-The Stories:...

     (1989)
  • Collected Stories (2007)
  • Dictation: A Quartet
    Dictation: A Quartet
    Dictation: A Quartet is the seventh and most recent collection of stories by American Author Cynthia Ozick.- Synopsis :DictationApproximately 15,000 Words. This story is about the secretaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad...

     (2008)

Essay collections

  • All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)
  • Art and Ardor (1983)
  • Metaphor & Memory (1989)
  • What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)
  • Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)
  • Quarrel & Quandary (2000)
  • The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)

Miscellaneous

  • A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)
  • The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)

External links


Reviews

  • 2000 NY Times: The Girl Who Would Be James by John Sutherland (on Ozick's book Quarrel & Quandary)
  • 2002 Partisan Review
    Partisan Review
    Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...

    : Cynthia Ozick, Aesthete by Sanford Pinsker
  • 2004 Law and Literature
    Law and literature
    The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature. This field has roots in two major developments in the intellectual history of law -- first, the growing doubt about whether law in isolation is a source of value and meaning, or whether it must...

    , vol. 16, pp. 229–235 (summer, 2004): Reading and Misreading the Reader by Jeffrey I. Roth (on Ozick's essay The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination)
  • 2005 The Guardian
    The Guardian
    The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

    : The World is Not Enough by Ali Smith (on Ozick's book The Bear Boy)
  • 2006 Moondance magazine
    Moondance magazine
    Moondance Magazine is an online international women's literary, culture and art journal.The magazine began in 1996 as one of the first publications to appear online in the early days of the "World Wide Web", only three years after the first web developers from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland announced...

    : Answering the Writer's Tumult – On Cynthia Ozick's 'The Din in the Head' by Lys Anzia
  • 2006 NY Times Book Review: The Canon as Cannon, by Walter Kirn (on Ozick's book "The Din in the Head")
  • 2010 NY Times Book Review: "Cynthia Ozick’s Homage to Henry James", by Thomas Mallon (on Ozick's book Foreign Bodies)
  • 2010 Jewish Ideas Daily
    Jewish Ideas Daily
    Jewish Ideas Daily is a website which reports on news, culture and political issues relating to Judaism and Israel. It was founded in January 2010 and regular contributors include Elliot Jager, Yehudah Mirsky, Allan Nadler, Aryeh Tepper and David Hazony....

    : "Taking Sides", by D. G. Myers (on Ozick's book Foreign Bodies)
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