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Bloodshed and Three Novellas
Introduces a New York hasidic fund raiser at tether's end, a small African nation's Polish-born international mouthpiece, a young scholar enslaved to her ideal, and a charlatan miracle worker who turns the tables on his mockers
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First published January 1, 1976
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About the author
Cynthia Ozick
110 books431 followersRecipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008.
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 17, 2010
Cynthia Ozick needs an image makeover. I've worked in a bookstore for just about 9 years, and I was a read pretty heavily for quite a few years before that and I know nothing about her. I know her name. I know she has some books in the fiction section that are put out by Vintage, and that she has some essay collections, and that she has guest edited some Best American something or others, but I couldn't tell you who would want to read her. Maybe middle-aged urbanely Jewish women who read the New Yorker some months? People who find John Updike a bit too WASP-ey and gimmicky? Women who would love to read Philip Roth but just don't care about his cock? The elderly? People who like thin books? Amos Oz fans who are curious about his neighbor to the right on the shelf? Almost illiterate Chuck Palanuick fans who can make out the words Fight Club and make a blind stab for another book to buy? People who like yellow books? These are getting more and more absurd, but I really don't know who reads her, who her target audience is; there are probably other writers hiding in the stacks whom I have no idea about but I'm having trouble coming up with more right now.
So, yeah, she needs an image makeover because she is fucking good! I mean really good, like just about five stars good, and maybe this collection is an anomaly, but if it is any indication of what her books are like then I will have to read them all and spend idle moments figuring out which of her books and stories I enjoy most in a Kowalski manner.
According to another review "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)" is DFW's favorite short story ever. I don't know where this fact comes from, I've read him saying one of Barthelme's stories in 60 Stories was (something about a balloon), I kind of hope that the other reviewer is right, because "Usurpation" is much better than the Balloon story.
I do know that the reason I went searching out to buy the very last new copy of this book available in the B&N accessible warehouses in the whole country (yep, I pushed this one to be out-of-print, sorry; please print more Syracuse University), was that this is written on the verso page of The Girl with Curious Hair:
Parts of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" are written in the margins of John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" and Cynthia Ozicks's "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)"; p. 294 of "Westward" contains the first seven lines of "Usurpation" from Cynthia Ozick's Bloodshed and Three Novellas.
Until a couple of weeks ago I had never noticed that before. But since "Westward" is one of my favorite pieces of DFW writing, and I love the way he out Barth's John Barth in the story (among other things going on in it) I felt like I needed to get this Ozick book, read the story and have that in my mind when I went back to read "Westward" again (this time sadly having to read the story as the suicide note he mentions it being in the Lipsky interview).
After reading the story I can definitely see some of what DFW took (was inspired by) from "Usurpation", and I can also see how he would have found the story to call to him in some way. The voice in the story has some of the same savvy self-consciousness mixed with abasement that his own writing has, and which one doesn't find too often (it being so easy to go overboard on the SC side of things, or to be so self-deprecating that the deprecation becomes a form of boisterous self-praise). I don't know what to really say about the story except you (yes, you specifically, I have you mostly in mind) should read it. Actually Syracuse University Press, and the Modern Jewish Literature series who put this book out should put right on the cover something to the effect of "Loved by DFW" and there will be a definite audience I'd be able to know would come running for the book. Seriously though, the story is fucking awesome and should be read.
If you don't want to take my word for it, then take Harold Bloom's. Apparently he has called it a singular piece of modern fiction, and in some list or other that he made of quality things to read, the story was the only post-1950 or living writer or something or other that was listed on it.
But what about the other three 'novellas'? (They are short stories, the whole book is only 160 pages, there are 4 of them in it, 40 pages is a short story. The use of the term novella irks me here). They are also all good stuff. Her writing is crisp and smooth like American bottled beer. Some of the pieces are almost 50 years old and they are still fresh. Her 'campus' story I was amazed to see was written in 1964, there being something still wonderfully relevant about the portraits she painted of intellectuals and their discontents.
I don't really have too much else to say. Each story has it's own voice, the voices are great, and you'll be the coolest kid on the block if you jump on this Cynthia Ozick craze that I'm predicting will be even bigger than the Fedor Sologub-mania that I instigated last year around this time.
So, yeah, she needs an image makeover because she is fucking good! I mean really good, like just about five stars good, and maybe this collection is an anomaly, but if it is any indication of what her books are like then I will have to read them all and spend idle moments figuring out which of her books and stories I enjoy most in a Kowalski manner.
According to another review "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)" is DFW's favorite short story ever. I don't know where this fact comes from, I've read him saying one of Barthelme's stories in 60 Stories was (something about a balloon), I kind of hope that the other reviewer is right, because "Usurpation" is much better than the Balloon story.
I do know that the reason I went searching out to buy the very last new copy of this book available in the B&N accessible warehouses in the whole country (yep, I pushed this one to be out-of-print, sorry; please print more Syracuse University), was that this is written on the verso page of The Girl with Curious Hair:
Parts of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" are written in the margins of John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" and Cynthia Ozicks's "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)"; p. 294 of "Westward" contains the first seven lines of "Usurpation" from Cynthia Ozick's Bloodshed and Three Novellas.
Until a couple of weeks ago I had never noticed that before. But since "Westward" is one of my favorite pieces of DFW writing, and I love the way he out Barth's John Barth in the story (among other things going on in it) I felt like I needed to get this Ozick book, read the story and have that in my mind when I went back to read "Westward" again (this time sadly having to read the story as the suicide note he mentions it being in the Lipsky interview).
After reading the story I can definitely see some of what DFW took (was inspired by) from "Usurpation", and I can also see how he would have found the story to call to him in some way. The voice in the story has some of the same savvy self-consciousness mixed with abasement that his own writing has, and which one doesn't find too often (it being so easy to go overboard on the SC side of things, or to be so self-deprecating that the deprecation becomes a form of boisterous self-praise). I don't know what to really say about the story except you (yes, you specifically, I have you mostly in mind) should read it. Actually Syracuse University Press, and the Modern Jewish Literature series who put this book out should put right on the cover something to the effect of "Loved by DFW" and there will be a definite audience I'd be able to know would come running for the book. Seriously though, the story is fucking awesome and should be read.
If you don't want to take my word for it, then take Harold Bloom's. Apparently he has called it a singular piece of modern fiction, and in some list or other that he made of quality things to read, the story was the only post-1950 or living writer or something or other that was listed on it.
But what about the other three 'novellas'? (They are short stories, the whole book is only 160 pages, there are 4 of them in it, 40 pages is a short story. The use of the term novella irks me here). They are also all good stuff. Her writing is crisp and smooth like American bottled beer. Some of the pieces are almost 50 years old and they are still fresh. Her 'campus' story I was amazed to see was written in 1964, there being something still wonderfully relevant about the portraits she painted of intellectuals and their discontents.
I don't really have too much else to say. Each story has it's own voice, the voices are great, and you'll be the coolest kid on the block if you jump on this Cynthia Ozick craze that I'm predicting will be even bigger than the Fedor Sologub-mania that I instigated last year around this time.
November 3, 2008
I first read the novella Usurpation for a seminar on Jewish American writers when I was in college. It may be the strangest story I have ever read, with characters including a talking goat who is cousin to a rabbi's wife and the ghost of the poet Tchernichovsky. The story is about writers, stories, and ambition. I have spent more time thinking about it than any other story I have read in the past fifteen years. The first paragraph ironically sums up a feeling I have frequently had while reading: "Occasionally a writer will encounter a story that is his, yet is not his. . . . But sometimes it happens that somebody else has written the story first. It is like being robbed of clothes you do not yet own."
December 9, 2013
If I handpicked the best stories from Pagan Rabbi and Bloodshed, it would be a 5 star collection, easy. But I want to leave a little room so that when I give something of hers 5 stars, I MEAN IT.
By my measure, the best stories/novellas of these two collections:
The Pagan Rabbi
Envy, or Yiddish in America
Virility
An Education
Usurpation (Other People's Stories)
A Mercenary
The Dock-Witch
By my measure, the best stories/novellas of these two collections:
The Pagan Rabbi
Envy, or Yiddish in America
Virility
An Education
Usurpation (Other People's Stories)
A Mercenary
The Dock-Witch
February 14, 2010
"Usurpation (Other People's Stories)" was among American writer David Foster Wallace's favorite pieces of short fiction.
Read
November 3, 2020loved usurpation and enjoyed an education.. found the preface more useful after reading usurpation than before
October 12, 2016
i am peeling away at the semi-revealed ozick! i am finished with this one but not done with it, i admit. unfortunately i will have to be further done with it soon, since this was lent to me—by the same person, excised from my notes on the pagan rabbi, whose copy of the pagan rabbi impelled me to find my own, at the hyde park used book sale last year. this year at the hyde park used book sale, on the first day of the hyde park used book sale, i had to go to ravenswood in the morning, and i ended up at ravenswood used books, which is sort of like Hoarders: Used Bookstore Edition. i spent so long in there familiarizing myself with the rambling half-sensical organization and ran into the darting owner so many times that i felt compelled to buy a book, and it was between a collected jane bowles and a book of ozick essays, and i bought the ozick, because i felt intended to. maybe i'm having an ozick moment. (the bowles wasn't the edition that has preface written by joy williams, and it was three dollars more. i didn't want to buy a book of ozick essays because judging by that nytmag profile and reviews of her essays, she's kind of annoying in them, but her preface to bloodshed is more fantastic, more naked, than it has any right to be.) then i traveled back to hyde park, stopped in for an hour and a half or so at the hyde park used book sale, and found the same book of ozick essays, art & ardor, that i'd just bought for, what, four and a half dollars more thirteen miles north? plus a much later book of stories. of course on bag & box day, monday, the same book of essays was still there, but the story collection was nowhere to be found.
anyway, ozick has been percolating into a burgeoning moment for a long time.
back to bloodshed. as i said, i'm not done with it. a mercenary is frankly racist or at least weird in a way i haven't had more time to think about (plus it is the, what, malamud? tradition of writing stories about jews & blacks being comparable ~somehow~), and bloodshed's transitions strangely remind me a lot of the way i wrote short stories when i was like sixteen and thought i still was a person interested in writing fiction. made for a sort of shaky reading experience. i suppose i'm leaving out that this was lent to me because she'd recommended an education to me, and i'd read as much as was available on google books and then burned into anxiety when i couldn't find the rest if it anywhere. so she brought it to hyde park for me. an education! una'd had enough with learning. she was so good at latin but not in a way that mattered. none of us is good at latin in a way that matters. usurpation is why i'm not done, though, usurpation is a story i need to read when i don't feel on the brink but i think it's a story that always makes you feel on the brink. usurpation is a story that you read and you feel all the while it's a bit much, it's sort of not working, and that stories like this are why most books are dumb, like why do other people bother writing stories when they're not writing like this. this constant burning edgy holding of conflicting notions in my head is how i constantly feel about ozick—nearly wrote "on ozick" which is perhaps truer. i told the lender i am constantly astonished by how her prose is simultaneously so sensual, so haptic, so tactile, so heavy, and at the same time so abrasive. i gave a professor a couple days later the same words (well, just tactile and abrasive, wouldn't it be embarrassing to hurl "haptic" at a professor) and he repeated this characterization at least twice, but instead of abrasive he kept saying acerbic. unsurprising for a classics professor to unconsciously turn to the latin derivative. acerbic is true too i suppose, though abrasive is in the end just a specific qualification of touch, which is what i needed. ozick's writing is something that feels real because it feels like something you can hold, because it feels like something that can weigh you down.
anyway, ozick has been percolating into a burgeoning moment for a long time.
back to bloodshed. as i said, i'm not done with it. a mercenary is frankly racist or at least weird in a way i haven't had more time to think about (plus it is the, what, malamud? tradition of writing stories about jews & blacks being comparable ~somehow~), and bloodshed's transitions strangely remind me a lot of the way i wrote short stories when i was like sixteen and thought i still was a person interested in writing fiction. made for a sort of shaky reading experience. i suppose i'm leaving out that this was lent to me because she'd recommended an education to me, and i'd read as much as was available on google books and then burned into anxiety when i couldn't find the rest if it anywhere. so she brought it to hyde park for me. an education! una'd had enough with learning. she was so good at latin but not in a way that mattered. none of us is good at latin in a way that matters. usurpation is why i'm not done, though, usurpation is a story i need to read when i don't feel on the brink but i think it's a story that always makes you feel on the brink. usurpation is a story that you read and you feel all the while it's a bit much, it's sort of not working, and that stories like this are why most books are dumb, like why do other people bother writing stories when they're not writing like this. this constant burning edgy holding of conflicting notions in my head is how i constantly feel about ozick—nearly wrote "on ozick" which is perhaps truer. i told the lender i am constantly astonished by how her prose is simultaneously so sensual, so haptic, so tactile, so heavy, and at the same time so abrasive. i gave a professor a couple days later the same words (well, just tactile and abrasive, wouldn't it be embarrassing to hurl "haptic" at a professor) and he repeated this characterization at least twice, but instead of abrasive he kept saying acerbic. unsurprising for a classics professor to unconsciously turn to the latin derivative. acerbic is true too i suppose, though abrasive is in the end just a specific qualification of touch, which is what i needed. ozick's writing is something that feels real because it feels like something you can hold, because it feels like something that can weigh you down.
Read
October 30, 2020Didn't really understand this collection but found it interesting/stimulating to read, kinda skimmed the last two because I felt so lost.
September 6, 2024
A mercenary --2
Bloodshed --2
An education --3
Usurpation (other people's stories) --2
Bloodshed --2
An education --3
Usurpation (other people's stories) --2
Read
October 6, 2018After reading Josh Lambert's Lit Hub piece (https://lithub.com/the-gordon-lish-li...), I knew that I had to read Cynthia Ozick's "Usurpation," which I was able to locate in this collection. "Usurpation" was definitely worth tracking down—as are the preface and "Bloodshed" and "An Education" in the same volume. "A Mercenary," however, put me off within the first few pages, and I confess that that one, I did not finish.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews