Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?

Marvin Mudrick insists on seeing authors and their characters as people. He describes and judges them frankly as we do when we tell our friends about people we want to, or have to, spend time with. A collection such as this is an invitation to meet some of them. We meet heroes and monsters and plenty of people in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics. We get to know them, so vivid are Mudrick's quotation and commentary. Essay after essay demonstrates that good criticism is itself good life and good literature.