PositiveThe Seattle Review of BooksOne hesitates to venture into such rarefied matters without prior approval, but one could infer that she believes that the pure writer/artist works alone in a kind of transcendent state ... Now eighty-eight, Ozick has nevertheless continued to seek an ideal purity in both a literary and a moral sense throughout her career, and she records her findings in Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, a collection of pieces she has previously published in literary periodicals. Each of these dense, allusive and complex essays explicates a facet of Ozick’s ideal purity ... It might be tempting to dismiss Ozick as outdated and impractical, a practitioner of an irrelevant perfectionism, and even to question whether Ozick’s call for ideal purity is a self-protective move rather than a literary one. However, doing so overlooks a potentially broader loss.
Roberto Calasso
PositiveThe Millions[Calasso] wants publishers to aspire to create new books that are equally as beautiful as Manutius’s perfect book. For some this charge may seem precious and as suffocating in its imposition of critical judgment as the Internet is in its lack of discrimination. This much is certain: No other publisher today has dared to claim as his own the singular judgment and unique artistry of the publisher-artist Calasso describes so precisely. That is because the one he has in mind is himself and the art his own.
