Sight-readings
Subtitle: American fictions
By: Elizabeth Hardwick.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 284
Subjects: American literature -- History and criticism.; Authors, American -- Biography.; United States -- Civilization.
Description: Newness and rootedness are the twin poles of Sight-Readings, Elizabeth Hardwick's new collection of essays.

In sections on Old New York, Americans Abroad, and Fictions of America, Hardwick considers writers and their landscapes, real and imagined. Her essays on Edith Wharton and Henry James illuminate aspects of their inventions of New York.

From there she takes us to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, into the hermetic world of Boston Transcendentalism, and on to the suburbs of John Cheever, the America of Philip Roth and John Updike, and the restless expanses of Richard Ford and the Prairie poets.