Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Starred Review.Acocella is theNew Yorker's dance  critic, but dancers and choreographers comprise a minority of the artists  featured in this elegant collection of writings mostly from theNew Yorker.The dance pieces are literally  the center of the book, sandwiched between Acocella's lucid assessments of  writers (and one sculptor, Louise Bourgeois). She has a taste for early  20th-century European, often Jewish novelists who, she says, helped create the  modern consciousness in literature: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo,  among others. In featuring these long-forgotten writers, she fulfills what, in  a fascinating profile of Susan Sontag, she calls "an essential function of  criticism: that of introducing readers to... strange work, things they wouldn't  ordinarily encounter." A particularly affecting look at Mikhail Baryshnikov in  1998 portrays a man long in search of an artistic home who had to find that  home, finally, within himself. The essays that follow the dance pieces focus  largely on American and British writers (Bellow, Philip Roth, Sybille Bedford).  Acocella can flatten a book she dislikes with cool derision ("The less she  knows, the more she tells us," Acocella says of Carol Shloss's biography of  Lucia Joyce), but her passionate and penetrating endorsements of other works  make you want to discover their pleasures firsthand—the best service a critic  can render.(Feb. 6)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.