Dictation: A Quartet is the seventh and most recent collection of stories by American Author Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. She is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson.-Background:Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children...

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Synopsis

Dictation

Approximately 15,000 Words. This story is about the secretaries of Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

 and Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...

. The two women have a brief lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

 affair, and hatch a scheme to switch a paragraph form each of their bosses new works.

Actors

Approximately 8,000 words, originally published in The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, and later in “Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.” This story is about a post-middle-aged Jewish actor with an Irish-sounding stage name who has just landed the role of King Lear in an off-Broadway

Off-Broadway

Off-Broadway theater is a term for a professional venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, and for a specific production of a play, musical or revue that appears in such a venue, and which adheres to related trade union and other contracts...

 play written by the daughter of a famous Yiddish actor.

At Fumicaro

Approximately 11,000 words, originally published in The New Yorker and later in “Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.” This story is about an American from New York who goes to Fumicaro, Italy for a conference on Catholicism. He meets a young, Italian chambermaid who is pregnant out of wedlock and decides to marry her and take her back home to America. The story takes place in the 1930s after Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

 has taken over. The characters in the story portray an eerie ambivalence to the idea of fascism

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

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What Happened to the Baby

Approximately 10,000 words, published in The Atlantic and “Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.” This story is about an elderly man who is in the middle of a life long ambition to create a new universal language called “GNU”, and his niece Vivian who has been charged by her mother to take care of him after his wife divorced him.