Adam Kirsch has been described as “elegant and astute…[a] critic of the very first order” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Kirsch shows how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art. In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and life of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: “Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone.” So shines literature, in these unflinchingly bold and provocative essays—as an illuminating, regenerative, and immortalizing force.
“It is fashionable today to mourn the paucity of public intellectuals in America. Meet Adam Kirsch, one of the very best literary/cultural critics writing today―a critic in the grand tradition of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling. Rocket and Lightship is a delight to read.”
― Marjorie Perloff
“Adam Kirsch is one of the best of our cultural and literary critics. Whether he is dispatching the repellent ideology of Slavoj Zizek or reappraising the literary legacy of E. M. Forster, he writes with stunning force and beautiful lucidity.”
― Janet Malcolm
Adam Kirsch 