Critical Encounters: Literary Views & Reviews, Nona Balakian (softcover)

This revised and expanded edition of Critical Encounters: Literary Views and Reviews is the only available collection of Nona Balakian’s (1918-1991) essays and reviews spanning her long and distinguished career as an editor and critic of The New York Times Book Review. Culled from her pieces in the Sunday and daily Times and from other literary publications, they bring together the best of her lucid and informed perceptions of the writers she considers to be “among the most vital of this century.” Always a pleasure to read, they provide an overview of the literary scene that is both wide-ranging and illuminating. Joyce Carol Oates has called it “a highly literate, informative, sensitive, and perhaps even prophetic book.”