Ozick, Cynthia 1928–

(Trudie Vosce)

PERSONAL: Born April 17, 1928, in New York, NY; daughter of William (a pharmacist) and Celia (Regelson) Ozick; married Bernard Hallote (a lawyer), September 7, 1952; children: Rachel Sarah. Education: New York University, B.A. (cum laude), 1949; Ohio State University, M.A., 1950.

ADDRESSES: Home—34 Soundview St., New Rochelle, NY 10805. Office—c/o Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 201 East 50th St., New York, NY 10022. Agent—Theron Raines, Raines & Raines, 71 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Writer and translator. Filene's Department Store, Boston, MA, advertising copywriter, 1952–53; New York University, New York, NY, instructor in English, 1964–65; City College of the City University of New York, distinguished artist-in-residence, 1981–82. Instructor at fiction workshop, Chautauqua Writers' Conference, July, 1966. Visiting lecturer at numerous colleges and universities.

MEMBER: PEN, Authors League of America, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dramatists Guild, Academie Universelle des Cultures (Paris, France), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1968; B'nai Brith Jewish Heritage Award, Edward Lewis Wallant Memorial Award, and National Book Award nomination, all 1972, all for The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories; Epstein Award, Jewish Book Council, 1972, for The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, and 1976, for Bloodshed and Three Novellas; American Academy of Arts Award for Literature, 1973; Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award, 1974; O. Henry First Prize Award in fiction, 1975, 1981, and 1984; Pushcart Press Lamport Prize, 1980; Guggenheim fellow, 1982; National Book Critics Circle Award nominations, 1982, 1983, and 1990; Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings grant, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1982–87; Distinguished Service in Jewish Letters Award, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1984; Distinguished Alumnus Award, New York University, 1984; PEN/Faulkner Award nomination, 1984; Rea Award for Short Story, Dungannon Foundation, 1986; Lucy Martin Donnelly fellow, Bryn Mawr College, 1992; National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, Jewish Book Council, 1977, for Bloodshed and Three Novellas; O. Henry Award, 1992, for "Puttermesser Paired"; PEN/Spiegel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay, 1997; Harold Washington Literary Award, 1997, from the City of Chicago; John Cheever Award, 1999; National Book Critics' Circle Award nomination for criticism, 2000, for Quarrel and Quandary. Honorary degrees from Yeshiva University, 1984, Hebrew Union College, 1984, Williams College, 1986, Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1987, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1988, Adelphi University, 1988, State University of New York, 1989, Brandeis University, 1990, Bard College, 1991, Spertus College, 1991, and Skid-more College, 1992.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Trust (novel), New American Library (New York, NY), 1966.

The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 1971.

Bloodshed and Three Novellas, Knopf (New York, NY), 1976.

Levitation: Five Fictions, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

The Cannibal Galaxy (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1983.

The Messiah of Stockholm (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1987.

The Shawl (contains the novella Rosa; also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.

Blue Light (play; based on "The Shawl"), produced in Sag Harbor, NY, 1994, produced as The Shawl in New York, NY, 1996.

The Puttermesser Papers (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

Heir to the Glimmering World (novel), Houghton (New York, NY), 2004.

OTHER

Art and Ardor: Essays, Knopf (New York, NY), 1983.

Metaphor and Memory: Essays, Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.

Epodes: First Poems, with woodcuts by Sidney Chafetz, Logan Elm Press (Columbus, OH), 1992.

What Henry James Knew, and Other Essays on Writers, J. Cape (London, England), 1993.

A Cynthia Ozick Reader, edited by Elaine M. Kauvar, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1996.

Fame and Folly: Essays, Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.

Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character, Pimlico Press (London, England), 1996.

(Author of introduction) Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, Penguin (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Robert Atwan) The Best American Essays 1998, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

Quarrel and Quandary: Essays, Random House (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor) Complete Works of Isaac Bable, translated by Peter Constantine, Norton (New York, NY), 2001.

(Author of afterword) Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism, edited with an introduction by Ron Rosenbaum, Random House (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of essays, poems, introductions, and translations to numerous anthologies, including Joyce Field and Leslie Field, editors, Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1975; Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf, editors, Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets, Avon (New York, NY), 1980; and The Jewish Bible: Thirty-seven American Authors, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1987. Contributor to "About Books" column in New York Times Book Review, 1987. Contributor, under pseudonym Trudie Vocse, of article "Twenty-four Years in the Life of Lyuba Bershadskaya" to New York Times Magazine. Contributor of other articles, reviews, poems, and translations to periodicals, including Commentary, New Republic, Partisan Review, New Leader, New York Times Book Review, Ms., Esquire, New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Harper's, and New York Times Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: Cynthia Ozick is "an important voice in American fiction, a woman whose intellect … is so impressive that it pervades the words she chooses, the stories she elects to tell, and every careful phrase and clause in which they are conveyed," wrote Doris Grumbach in the Washington Post Book World. An acclaimed novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic, Ozick remains best known for her fiction, and in this regard "few contemporary authors have demonstrated her range, knowledge, or passion," added essayist Diane Cole in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Described by Elaine M. Kauvar in Contemporary Literature as a "master of the meticulous sentence and champion of the moral sense of art," Ozick writes on a variety of subjects, often mixing such elements as fantasy, mysticism, comedy, satire, and Judaic law and history, in a style that suggests a poet's perfectionism and a philosopher's dialectic. Although many of her works are steeped in Judaic culture and explore the conflict between the sacred and the profane, the epithet "Jewish writer"—as she has been called—is a misnomer according to many critics, including Ozick herself, who claims in Art and Ardor that the term is an oxymoron. Rather, to quote Robert R. Harris in Saturday Review, she is fundamentally a writer "obsessed with the words she puts on paper, with what it means to imagine a story and to tell it, with what fiction is. The result is a body of work at once as rich as Grace Paley's stories, as deeply rooted in Jewish folklore as Isaac Bashevis Singer's tales, [and] as comically ironic as Franz Kafka's nightmares."

Ozick has attracted the attention of readers and reviewers of serious fiction ever since her first book, Trust, was published in 1966. Narrated by an anonymous young woman searching for real and psychological identity, Trust is a long, intricately plotted literary novel about personal and political betrayal that, according to New York Times Book Review contributor David L. Stevenson, hearkens back to the tradition of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence. Martin Tucker pointed out in the New Republic that Ozick's "style, though shaped by the ancient moderns … is not self-consciously imitative. The outstanding achievement of her first novel is its play with words, its love of paradox." Other critics have also praised Ozick's linguistic virtuosity in Trust, although several share Tucker's opinion that "sometimes the cleverness of her style is obtrusive." R.Z. Sheppard, for instance, commented in Book Week that Trust "introduces a novelist of remarkable intelligence, learning, and inventiveness—qualities that make the book an uncommonly rich reading experience, yet qualities so lavishly displayed they frequently hobble … Ozick's muse." Nevertheless, Sheppard believed Ozick "still manages a considerable achievement of passion and skill," and Tucker called the novel "brilliant." Stevenson, moreover, hailed the book as "that extraordinary literary entity, a first novel that is a genuine novel, wholly self-contained and produced by a rich, creative imagination."

Following Trust, Ozick published three award-winning collections of short fiction—The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, Bloodshed and Three Novellas, and Levitation: Five Fictions—that firmly established her literary reputation. In a New York Times Book Review article on The Pagan Rabbi Johanna Kaplan maintained that Ozick proves herself to be "a kind of narrative hypnotist. Her range is extraordinary; there is seemingly nothing she cannot do. Her stories contain passages of intense lyricism and brilliant, hilarious, uncontainable inventiveness—jokes, lists, letters, poems, parodies, satires." Reflecting on the collections, New York Review of Books contributor A. Alvarez called Ozick "a stylist in the best and most complete sense: in language, in wit, in her apprehension of reality and her curious, crooked flights of imagination…. Although there is nothing stiff or overcompacted about her writing …, she … has the poet's perfectionist habit of mind and obsession with language, as though one word out of place would undo the whole fabric." Such quality of invention prompted New York Times reviewer John Leonard to call the title story of Levitation "a masterpiece" and led New York Times Book Review contributor Leslie Epstein to regard The Pagan Rabbi and Bloodshed as "perhaps the finest work in short fiction by a contemporary writer." Ozick's talent furthermore encouraged Newsweek contributor Peter S. Prescott to "fearlessly predict that when the chroniclers of our literary age catch up to what has been going on (may Ozick live to see it!), some of her stories will be reckoned among the best written in our time."

Cole provided an indication of Ozick's stylistic virtuosity: "From page to page, Ozick will shift from an elevated Biblical inflection to the stilted Yiddish of the Russian immigrant to a slangy American vernacular; from sharply focused realism to fantastical flights into the supernatural. Magical transformations abound—of women into sea nymphs, trees into dryads, virile young poets into elderly androgynes." Similarly, Ozick's tales defy easy explication, in part because of their "thought-provoking dialectical quality," according to Harris. Carole Horn noted in the Washington Post Book World: "You could think about the themes that run through 'Bloodshed,' 'Usurpation' and 'The Mercenary' at great length…. The more of the Jewish Idea, as Ozick calls it, you have at your command, the broader the levels of meaning you could explore. But you don't need that to find them interesting reading." Harris pointed out that because Ozick "deals with ideas—many of them steeped in Jewish Law and history—her stories are 'difficult.' But by difficult I mean only that they are not in the least bit fluffy. No word, emotion, or idea is wasted. They are weighty, consequential tales, lightened and at the same time heightened by their visionary aspects…. Her stories are elusive, mysterious, and disturbing. They shimmer with intelligence, they glory in language, and they puzzle."

Ozick's works wrestle with theological issues, although the author once described herself as "neither a philosopher nor a theologian, and my focus—as is that of any writer concerned with style—is on writing good sentences." According to Cole, Ozick's work sometimes highlights "characters … torn between the opposing claims of two religions. One is always pagan, whether it be the worship of nature or the idolatrous pursuit of art, whereas the other—Judaism—is sacred." Kaplan, among others, viewed this theme in its broadest theological sense as a "variant of the question: what is holy? Is it the extraordinary, that which is beyond possible human experience—dryads ('The Pagan Rabbi') or sea-nymphs ('The Dock-Witch')? Or is the holiness in life to be discovered, to be seen in what is ordinarily, blindly, unthinkingly discounted?" But Eve Ottenberg, in her New York Times Magazine profile of Ozick, maintained that this theme has its greatest impact in a specifically Jewish context. "Over and over again …," stated Ottenberg, Ozick's "characters struggle, suffer, perform bizarre feats, even go mad as a result of remaining or finding out what it means to remain—culturally, and above all, religiously—Jewish…. Her characters are often tempted into worshiping something other than God—namely, idols. And this struggle marks her characters with a singular aloneness—the aloneness of people who are thinking a great deal about who they are, and for whom thinking, not doing, is the most emotional and engaging aspect of their lives."

Critics have attributed to Ozick's fiction an emphasis on the notion of idolatry. "Idolatry is Cynthia Ozick's great theme," announced Edmund White in a New York Times Book Review appraisal of The Cannibal Galaxy. "In stories, essays and … in her second novel she meditates on this deep concern—the hubris of anyone who dares to rival the Creator by fashioning an idol." Harold Bloom declared in the New York Times Book Review that the central point of Ozick's work, culminating in The Messiah of Stockholm, is to somehow reconcile her need to create fiction with her desire to remain a follower of the Jewish tradition. "Ozick's vision of literature," wrote Bloom, "is conditioned by her anxiety about idolatry, her fear of making stories into so many idols. And her most profound insight concerns her ambivalence about the act of writing and the condemnation of the religion of art, or the worship of Moloch. This insight comes to the fore when she asks herself the combative question that governs every strong writer: 'Why do we become what we most desire to contend with?'"

Bloom felt that Ozick's response to this question in her early essays and stories "was immensely bitter." The novella Usurpation, collected in Bloodshed and Three Novellas, is ostensibly "a tale against tale telling," according to Paul Gray in Time. "The thoroughly Jewish concern in this work," added Ruth R. Wisse in Commentary, "is the writing of fiction itself, in … Ozick's view an inheritance from the Gentiles and by nature an idolatrous activity. Art—in the Western tradition of truth to fiction as its own end—is against the Second Commandment, she says, and anti-Jewish in its very impulse. As a Jewish artist,… Ozick undertakes to subvert the aesthetic ideal by demonstrating its corrupting and arrogant presumption to truth."

Bloom considered Ozick's "triumph" in The Messiah of Stockholm to be "a developed awareness that her earlier view of art as idolatry was too severe…. The novel is a complex and fascinating meditation on the nature of writing and the responsibilities of those who choose to create—or judge—tales. Yet on a purely realistic level, it manages to capture the atmosphere of Stockholm and to be, at times, very funny indeed about the daily operations of one of the city's newspapers and … [the protagonist's] peculiar detachment from everyday work and life."

In addition to these concerns, The Messiah of Stockholm garnered praise for its stylistic vitality. Calling the book "a poetic yet often raucously comic epic" in Chicago's Tribune Books, Mona Simpson maintained that "of course, no work of Ozick's can be talked about without first acknowledging the simple brilliance of her prose." John Calvin Batchelor insisted in the Washington Post Book World that The Messiah of Stockholm "is a superb read, with prose so deft that were it fisticuffs the author would be forbidden by law to combat mortals." But perhaps the finest compliment came from Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times: "What distinguishes The Messiah of Stockholm and lofts it above your run-of-the-mill philosophical novel is the author's distinctive and utterly original voice…. Ozick possesses an ability to mix up the surreal and the realistic, juxtapose Kafkaesque abstractions with Waugh-like comedy. Bizarre images … float, like figures in a Chagall painting, above precisely observed, naturalistic tableaux; and seemingly ordinary people suddenly become visionaries capable of madness or magic. The result is fiction that has the power to delight us—and to make us think."

The Shawl, first published in 1989, contains two tales—the short story "The Shawl" and a novella titled Rosa. Although both works were published separately—in somewhat different form—in the New Yorker, "they take on new resonance and weight from their inclusion here together," wrote Francine Prose in the New York Times Book Review. Both stories center on Rosa Lublin, who, in "The Shawl," witnesses the death of her baby daughter, Magda, when the girl is thrown against an electrified fence in a Nazi concentration camp. A linen shawl Rosa had allowed the child to suck on (they had no food) becomes a relic to the bereaved mother, whose story resumes many years later in Rosa. Now retired in Miami, mentally unstable, and still unable to accept the fact of her daughter's brutal death, she reveres the shawl because it brings her closer to Magda; it even empowers her to see visions of her daughter as an adolescent or an adult.

In The Shawl, commented Prose, "Ozick explores the complex connections among idolatry, maternity and philosophy…. Yet The Shawl is not a raking-over of familiar ground. Instead, Ms. Ozick goes farther to suggest that history too may be cast in the role of demiurge, that Rosa's idolatrous pantheon includes not only her daughter, but her own past, the war, the 'real life' that, she keeps repeating, has been stolen from her by thieves." Elie Wiesel, writing in Chicago's Tribune Books, argued that The Shawl "is not a book about the Holocaust, but about men and women who have survived it" and praised Ozick's style: "Rosa's impotent but overwhelming anger, her burning memories, her implacable solicitude, her hallucinations, her shawl—Ozick speaks of them with so much tact and delicacy that we ask ourselves with wonder and admiration what has she done to understand and penetrate Rosa's dark and devastated soul." Irving Halperin, reviewing the book for Commonweal, reached a similar conclusion: "It is a testimony to Ms. Ozick's artistry and depth of understanding that Rosa, though given to rage and moments of dementia, is sympathetically drawn."

Ozick has continued to impress critics with her fiction, including The Puttermesser Papers. The title character, attorney Rosa Puttermesser, had previously appeared in a few of Ozick's short stories. The novel, however, takes Puttermesser from the age of thirty-four to her death and beyond. Bernard F. Dick in World Literature Today commented that "no matter how bizarre the narrative becomes, Ozick moves easily between the poles of verisimilitude and absurdism." Heir to the Glimmering World again demonstrates Ozick's art and skill in the novel form by "mixing themes of faith, identify, and art into a crazy salad of a plot set in New York City during the great depression," according to Starr E. Smith in Library Journal. Described as a "witty book," Heir to the Glimmering World is sure to "will appeal to admirers of the fanciful tales in Ozick's Puttermesser Papers" due to its "intellectual depth," added the critic. In the novel Ozick "dramatizes the conflict between theology and science, various modes of mythmaking and survival," Donna Seaman explained in a Booklist review.

Ozick's commentaries on fellow writers have been collected in several volumes, among them What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers, Quarrel and Quandary, and Fame and Folly: Essays. In What Henry James Knew Ozick deplores what she considers a cheapening and fragmentation of culture. "Her complaint is the usual one: we are in a deep pit filled with trivia, a hell of baseless chattering, butterfly minds alighting on the ephemeral and flitting away again," wrote Hilary Mantel in the Spectator. Mantel praised the style with which Ozick expresses this complaint, finding it "elegant and succinct, and so discriminating and precise that it is difficult to condense or paraphrase her arguments." Fame and Folly "is concerned with both the external machinery of fame and the internal mechanisms of self-destruction that shape the lives of artists," according to Kakutani in the New York Times. "Ozick presents the reader with a fistful of marvelous essays that live up to her own exacting standards of what an essay should be," the critic continued. "In these pages, Ms. Ozick gives us history, argument and, yes, illumination."

In 2000's Quarrel and Quandary Ozick explores topics such as her beloved Henry James, comparisons between a Dostoevsky character and the Unabomber, and what she feels went wrong in the process of adapting Anne Frank's diary to the stage and screen. Dick, in yet another piece for World Literature Today, maintained that "one of Cynthia Ozick's great gifts as an essayist is to take the reader on a voyage into a mind." Similarly, Edward Alexander in Midstream reported that "her bold formulations come to us with concentrated epigrammatic force and measured cadences that are a music to the inward ear."

Whether critics agree with the sentiments expressed in Ozick's essays or not, they have frequently been impressed by how she mounts her arguments. "She not only constantly illuminates the subjects she deals with, she makes one understand that most answers, most conclusions, most views, are slick and inadequate," observed Gabriel Josipovici in the Times Literary Supplement. And in New Statesman and Society, Guy Mannes-Abbott concluded: "Ozick has been called the best essayist in America. Better than best, she is the most singular."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Alexander, Edward, The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate, Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 1979.

Berger, Alan L., Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, New York State University Press (Albany, NY), 1985.

Bloom, Harold, editor, Cynthia Ozick: Modern Critical Views, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 1986.

Cohen, Sarah Blacher, Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1978.

Cohen, Sarah Blacher, Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1994.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 3, 1975, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 28, 1984, Volume 62, 1990.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 28: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982, 1983, 1983, 1984.

Finkelstein, Norman, The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1992.

Friedman, Lawrence S., Understanding Cynthia Ozick, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1991.

Kauvar, Elaine M., Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1993.

Kielsky, Vera Emuna, Inevitable Exiles: Cynthia Ozick's View of the Precariousness of Jewish Existence in a Gentile Society, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1989.

Lowin, Joseph, Cynthia Ozick, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1988.

Ozick, Cynthia, Art and Ardor, Knopf (New York, NY), 1983.

Pinksker, Sanford, The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1987.

Rainwater, Catherine, and William J. Scheick, editors, Three Contemporary Women Novelists: Hazzard, Ozick, and Redmon, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1983.

Rainwater, Catherine, and William J. Scheick, editors, Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1985.

Shapiro, Michael, editor, Divisions between Liberalism and Traditionalism in the American Jewish Community: Cleft or Chasm, Edwin Mellen (Lewiston, NY), 1991.

Strandberg, Victor H., Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1991.

Walden, Daniel, editor, The World of Cynthia Ozick: Studies in American Jewish Literature, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 1987.

Walden, Daniel, editor, The Changing Mosaic: From Cahan to Malamud, Roth, and Ozick, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1993.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Heir to the Glimmering World, p. 1800.

Book World, June 19, 1966.

Boston Globe, September 13, 1989, p. 41.

Chicago Tribune Book World, February 14, 1982; October 30, 1983.

Christian Century, March 7, 1990, p. 258.

Commentary, June, 1976; March, 1984; May, 1984; July, 1987, p. 52.

Commonweal, December 2, 1966, review of Trust; September 3, 1971, review of The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories; December 15, 1989, pp. 711-712.

Contemporary Literature, spring, 1985; winter, 1985.

Critique, Volume IX, number 2, 1967.

Hudson Review, spring, 1984.

Interview, August, 1994, p. 48.

Library Journal, July, 2004, Starr E. Smith, review of Heir to the Glimmering World.

London Review of Books, February 4, 1988, p. 17; October 21, 1993, pp. 12-13.

Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1987.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 29, 1983, review of The Cannibal Galaxy; September 18, 1983; October 8, 1989, p. 2.

Midstream, November, 2000, Edward Alexander, review of Quarrel and Quandary, p. 44.

Nation, February 20, 1982; July 23-30, 1983.

New Republic, August 13, 1966, Martin Tucker, review of Trust; June 5, 1976; April 6, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm, p. 39.

New Statesman, January 8, 1988, p. 32.

New Statesman and Society, June 4, 1993, p. 41.

Newsweek, May 10, 1971, review of The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories; April 12, 1976; February 15, 1982; May 30, 1983, review of The Cannibal Galaxy; September 12, 1983.

New Yorker, May 13, 1996, pp. 88-93.

New York Review of Books, April 1, 1976; May 13, 1982; November 30, 1983, review of The Cannibal Galaxy; May 28, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm, p. 18.

New York Times, July 9, 1966, review of Trust; July 5, 1971; January 28, 1982; April 27, 1983; August 29, 1983; March 25, 1987; March 28, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm; September 5, 1989, p. C17; October 3, 1989, pp. C15, C21; May 7, 1996, p. B3.

New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1966, David L. Stevenson, review of Trust; June 13, 1971, review of The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories; April 11, 1976; January 31, 1982; February 14, 1982; May 22, 1983; September 11, 1983; March 22, 1987, p. 1; April 23, 1989, p. 9; September 10, 1989, pp. 1, 39; December 3, 1989, p. 72; September 15, 1991, p. 34.

New York Times Magazine, April 10, 1983, review of The Cannibal Galaxy.

Observer (London, England), November 15, 1987, p. 26; July 7, 1991, p. 57; June 20, 1993, p. 62; September 18, 1994, p. 20.

Publishers Weekly, January 30, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm, p. 369; March 27, 1987; February 17, 1989, p. 60; July 28, 1989, p. 204; July 29, 1990, p. 98; August 9, 1991, p. 55; March 22, 2004, p. 70.

Saturday Review, July 9, 1966, review of Trust; February, 1982.

Spectator, January 16, 1988, p. 29; May 29, 1993, pp. 25-26.

Time, August 12, 1966, review of Trust; April 12, 1976, Paul Gray, review of Bloodshed and Three Novellas; February 15, 1982; September 5, 1983.

Times (London, England), April 8, 1982.

Times Literary Supplement, January 26, 1967; April 23, 1982; January 20, 1984; January 25, 1985, p. 102; June 4, 1993, p. 25.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 1, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm, p. 7; April 30, 1989, p. 7; September 17, 1989, p. 6.

USA Today, March 20, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm, p. 4D; November 16, 1989, p. D6.

Village Voice, February 10, 1982; April 21, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm, p. 45.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1987, p. 95; winter, 1990, p. 21.

Voice Literary Supplement, March, 1990, p. 11.

Wall Street Journal, June 20, 1997.

Washington Post, February 12, 1990, p. B1.

Washington Post Book World, June 6, 1971, review of The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories; March 13, 1977; February 28, 1982; July 3, 1983; September 25, 1983; March 8, 1987, review of The Messiah of Stockholm; November 5, 1989, p. 7.

World Literature Today, winter, 1998, Bernard F. Dick, review of The Puttermesser Papers, pp. 135-136; spring, 2001, Bernard F. Dick, review of Quarrel and Quandary, p. 339.