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The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays
The New Yorker critic examines the books that reveal and record our world in a new essay collection.
Joan Acocella, “one of our finest cultural critics” (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it―its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times , “Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?”
The Bloodied And Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella’s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations, “life and art.” In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling in the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.
Joan Acocella, “one of our finest cultural critics” (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it―its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times , “Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?”
The Bloodied And Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella’s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations, “life and art.” In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling in the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published February 20, 2024
21 people are currently reading
460 people want to read
About the author
Joan Acocella
23 books23 followersJoan B. Acocella was an American journalist who served as a dance and book critic for The New Yorker.
Acocella received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. Acocella was a 2012 Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Acocella has served as the senior critic and reviews editor for Dance Magazine and New York dance critic for the Financial Times. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and was appointed dance critic in 1998.
Her New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy", which appeared in the November 27, 1995 issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. (2004).
Acocella received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. Acocella was a 2012 Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Acocella has served as the senior critic and reviews editor for Dance Magazine and New York dance critic for the Financial Times. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and was appointed dance critic in 1998.
Her New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy", which appeared in the November 27, 1995 issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. (2004).
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 9, 2024
Nice collection of essays. The title essay is about Dracula, in particular about a recent annotated edition of the novel. It is a good look at not only the book in review but also in terms of why Dracula is so popular. Both the Gorey and Carter essays are also quite good.
November 6, 2023
As someone who had a New Yorker subscription for a year, and yet would often find myself ignoring the long-reads, articles, and reviews to instead flick straight to the crossword, it was a strange pleasure to learn that I had been missing out: these essays (lifted predominantly from the New Yorker, although a couple also borrowed from the New York Review of Books) were an absolute delight - sharply observant, well-researched, and fun. Like most collections centred around art or literature, the most enjoyable were those featuring those I was already familiar with - the essays on Dracula, Richard Pryor, and Elena Ferrante, for example - and yet Acocella was also able to make that which seemed uninteresting or insignificant (e.g. prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries) equally compelling. And each essay was the perfect, bite-sized length; slim enough to read in a single sitting, without ever feeling rushed or cut short.
Perhaps stemming from my own ignorance (aka my skewed interest in crosswords over the New Yorker's actual content), I think I would have appreciated a little more information about Acocella herself - although I really appreciated her clean, critical style across the essays, it would have interesting to learn about her life and career in the introduction - by the end of the book, I felt myself wondering how she had come to be so knowledgeable about such a wide array of different subjects.
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC ebook - I really loved reading this, and will be strongly recommending it!
Perhaps stemming from my own ignorance (aka my skewed interest in crosswords over the New Yorker's actual content), I think I would have appreciated a little more information about Acocella herself - although I really appreciated her clean, critical style across the essays, it would have interesting to learn about her life and career in the introduction - by the end of the book, I felt myself wondering how she had come to be so knowledgeable about such a wide array of different subjects.
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC ebook - I really loved reading this, and will be strongly recommending it!
Read
November 26, 2025Lucid writing in a congenial tone. These essays are mostly book reviews.
There are essays on Gilgamesh and Job and Beowulf. So I was interested to pick up the book, but fairly disappointed that I didn't see some new angles for understanding those stories. Maybe for Job, but the new angle was "It's confusing."
Personal details about Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene seem to be her forte. Or the title essay about vampires. None of which pique my interest. Sorry
There are essays on Gilgamesh and Job and Beowulf. So I was interested to pick up the book, but fairly disappointed that I didn't see some new angles for understanding those stories. Maybe for Job, but the new angle was "It's confusing."
Personal details about Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene seem to be her forte. Or the title essay about vampires. None of which pique my interest. Sorry
February 24, 2024
This is a magical book. Maybe that is all I need to say about it to persuade you to read it—even to STUDY IT--to see how it achieves its magic. That is what I would do—study it—if I felt I could take the time. But the list of great books is long. Life is short (especially at my age). And now I want to move on to read Joan Acocella's other books (including the textbook she co-authored on abnormal psychology!) besides this one, the first of hers I have read from cover to cover.
I hope then that one word—MAGICAL—will be enough to get you to pay attention to what Joan Acocella says in *this* book about art, life, and thought. (Or, if you need further persuasion, you could read her beautiful obituary by Richard Sandomir that appeared in the January 24, 2024, issue of the New York Times.)
But maybe you are not persuaded when a total stranger you have never heard of, much less met, who does not even reveal his real name, simply tells you that you MUST read this book. For you, then, I will try to provide evidence for asserting that you MUST read this book.
I guess I need now to assure you I am not related to Acocella. I never met her. I have never met anyone who met her or knew her. I never even was in the same room as her.
I guess I also must acknowledge you may think “this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” To that I say Joan Acocella certainly knows what *she* is talking about. So stop reading me. READ HER.
The twenty-four essays in this book are presented in chronological order of publication, except for the title essay, which I think comes first not just because the essay’s title makes an eye-catching title for a book, but also because—for me, at least—the essay itself is a nice introduction to what Acocella does in the essays that follow.
What makes the book magical for me is the variety of ways you can read it. Yes, you can read the essays in chronological order, as I did. But now that I have finished the book, I can see that the essays might even be more rewarding to read in groups.
Group A: essays on works that will be with us (for better or worse) forever: Dracula, Gibran, Grimm’s fairytales, Book of Job, Beowulf (in JRR Tolkien’s unpublished translation), Little Women, Gilgamesh, Letters of Pliny the Younger.
Group B: essays--on a diverse array of famous creative people—that “shuttle back and forth between the artist’s life and his/her art” and show us why it is “exciting to watch these people, most of them young, with no money and no prospects, find their way into art.”
Group C: essays on dictionaries and dirty words.
Or you could group them this way:
Group A as above; but then
B: essays on books for children of any age—Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Little Women, My Dog Tulip by JD Ackerley (whom I regret I had never heard of until reading about him here); children’s books by Gianni Rodari (another writer I regret I had never heard of);
C: essays about--let’s call them--entertainers: Agatha Christie (based on Acocella’s reading of all 66 of Christie’s detective novels!); Richard Pryor, Elmore Leonard, Graham Greene;
D: essays about varieties of feminism: Marilynne Robinson, Elena Ferrante, Angela Carter, Louisa May Alcott, Natalia Ginzburg;
E: essays about famously and/or notoriously eccentric creators: Gibran, Evelyn Waugh, Angela Carter, Edward Gorey, Andy Warhol, Frances Bacon.
I can think of other ways these essays can be grouped, for instance, on religion; on writers who were first published in Italian; on visual artists, but you get the idea.
Read chronologically, the book is an engaging, insightful, thought-provoking, always witty kind of variety show (you probably can think of a better metaphor) of criticism at its best: balanced and inspiring, essays that make you want to read the book being reviewed and maybe even learn more about the essay’s subject.
Read in groups like those above (or groups of your own design) the book will still have all the qualities just mentioned AND you will see how these essays—written years apart and prompted only by the appearance of new books to review—connect to each other. And when you see that, you might well feel, as I do, that you have witnessed magic. You perhaps will see, as I do, why these particular subjects must have had particular appeal to this brilliant critic, and why she is able to make them—and this book—magically appealing to you, too.
And this is where the one “unchronological” essay comes in and the other reason why I think it is appropriate as a title for the book. I don’t mean to imply that Acocella is like Dracula. But her method in all these essays bears a similarity to his: extract the essence of a subject to achieve a feeling of fullness [in the reader!].
Anyway, no matter how you read the book—AND YOU SHOULD—you will be dazzled by Acocella’s magical turns of phrase. Here are a few (okay, too many) that I especially liked:
• The English upper and upper-middle classes in the years surrounding the First and Second World Wars. . . were not as nice as we are, and they were much funnier.
• [Gibran’s The Prophet is a book] with margins you could drive a truck through—a selling point not to be dismissed.
• With Christie we are dealing not so much with a literary figure as with a broad cultural phenomenon like Barbie or the Beatles.
• Presumably as your child is nodding off you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of patriarchy.
• This seems a perfect example of psychoanalytic critics’ habitual indifference to the obvious
• The reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is.
• God, not Job, is the star of the book, and though he is not loving or fair that is part of the attraction.
• Robinson writes about religion two ways. One is meliorist, reformist. The other is rapturous, visionary. Many people have been good at the first kind; few, today, at the second kind. The second kind is Robinson’s forte.
• Pryor would not toe the line, any line, and we should honor him for this.
• It is the exploration of women’s mental underworld that makes [Ferrante’s Neapolitan series] so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed in all literature
• Not all of [Elmore Leonard’s novels] are on this level [of greatness], but five or six of them are, plus parts of many others. That’s a lot.
• There’s not a dirty joke in the world that he doesn’t think is funny.
• She was young, and she had only a few years of absolutely first-rank work, but that is true of many writers, including some of the greatest.
• Her father, Bronson Alcott, was an intellectual, or, in any case, a man who had thoughts.
• [Little Women] is not so much a novel, in the Henry James sense of the term, as a sort of wad of themes and scenes and cultural wishes. It is more like the Mahabharata or the Old Testament than it is like a novel. And that makes it an extraordinary novel.
• Something can suddenly appear in our lives—blood on the carpet, a letter without a return address—and after that nothing is ever the same.
• As regards eccentricity, funny how certain artists are that way. Don’t let this biographer loose on Gogol.
• Chalk it up to the culture wars and maybe also a concern for the bottom line, plus our old friend bad taste.
• This theme, of the blindness of European Jewish families to the actual mortal threat of the Fascists, has been sounded before, but rarely with such flair.
• Charles Darwin put forth a theory suggesting that human beings might be descended from lower animals, things with fur.
• With what must be the most robust erection in world literature …
• Before that the two young men were killing monsters and having sex—not such a different plotline from that of a modern action movie.
• The other day I tried to buy Tales Told by a Machine, from 1976. Amazon had a hardcover copy, for $967. This is a crime against art.
• Basically, anytime an organization needed someone to go, expenses paid, to a country that had crocodiles, [Graham Greene] was interested.
• After the Second World War, the Catholic Church would provide a suitably august arena for the transition to another sort of religion: doubt, anxiety, existentialism.
• In the twentieth century pity was hard to write about. That this dark-hearted man [Graham Greene] managed to—even that he tried—is surely a jewel in his crown.
• He [Francis Bacon] was not a discreet man, bless him, and his daily routine was widely known.
An advance copy in galley form via NetGalley.
I did not see all the illustrations that will be in the published book. They surely will enhance it.
My thanks to author and publisher.
Please note: Quotes taken from a galley may change in the final version.
(Opinions expressed here are my own.)
I hope then that one word—MAGICAL—will be enough to get you to pay attention to what Joan Acocella says in *this* book about art, life, and thought. (Or, if you need further persuasion, you could read her beautiful obituary by Richard Sandomir that appeared in the January 24, 2024, issue of the New York Times.)
But maybe you are not persuaded when a total stranger you have never heard of, much less met, who does not even reveal his real name, simply tells you that you MUST read this book. For you, then, I will try to provide evidence for asserting that you MUST read this book.
I guess I need now to assure you I am not related to Acocella. I never met her. I have never met anyone who met her or knew her. I never even was in the same room as her.
I guess I also must acknowledge you may think “this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” To that I say Joan Acocella certainly knows what *she* is talking about. So stop reading me. READ HER.
The twenty-four essays in this book are presented in chronological order of publication, except for the title essay, which I think comes first not just because the essay’s title makes an eye-catching title for a book, but also because—for me, at least—the essay itself is a nice introduction to what Acocella does in the essays that follow.
What makes the book magical for me is the variety of ways you can read it. Yes, you can read the essays in chronological order, as I did. But now that I have finished the book, I can see that the essays might even be more rewarding to read in groups.
Group A: essays on works that will be with us (for better or worse) forever: Dracula, Gibran, Grimm’s fairytales, Book of Job, Beowulf (in JRR Tolkien’s unpublished translation), Little Women, Gilgamesh, Letters of Pliny the Younger.
Group B: essays--on a diverse array of famous creative people—that “shuttle back and forth between the artist’s life and his/her art” and show us why it is “exciting to watch these people, most of them young, with no money and no prospects, find their way into art.”
Group C: essays on dictionaries and dirty words.
Or you could group them this way:
Group A as above; but then
B: essays on books for children of any age—Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Little Women, My Dog Tulip by JD Ackerley (whom I regret I had never heard of until reading about him here); children’s books by Gianni Rodari (another writer I regret I had never heard of);
C: essays about--let’s call them--entertainers: Agatha Christie (based on Acocella’s reading of all 66 of Christie’s detective novels!); Richard Pryor, Elmore Leonard, Graham Greene;
D: essays about varieties of feminism: Marilynne Robinson, Elena Ferrante, Angela Carter, Louisa May Alcott, Natalia Ginzburg;
E: essays about famously and/or notoriously eccentric creators: Gibran, Evelyn Waugh, Angela Carter, Edward Gorey, Andy Warhol, Frances Bacon.
I can think of other ways these essays can be grouped, for instance, on religion; on writers who were first published in Italian; on visual artists, but you get the idea.
Read chronologically, the book is an engaging, insightful, thought-provoking, always witty kind of variety show (you probably can think of a better metaphor) of criticism at its best: balanced and inspiring, essays that make you want to read the book being reviewed and maybe even learn more about the essay’s subject.
Read in groups like those above (or groups of your own design) the book will still have all the qualities just mentioned AND you will see how these essays—written years apart and prompted only by the appearance of new books to review—connect to each other. And when you see that, you might well feel, as I do, that you have witnessed magic. You perhaps will see, as I do, why these particular subjects must have had particular appeal to this brilliant critic, and why she is able to make them—and this book—magically appealing to you, too.
And this is where the one “unchronological” essay comes in and the other reason why I think it is appropriate as a title for the book. I don’t mean to imply that Acocella is like Dracula. But her method in all these essays bears a similarity to his: extract the essence of a subject to achieve a feeling of fullness [in the reader!].
Anyway, no matter how you read the book—AND YOU SHOULD—you will be dazzled by Acocella’s magical turns of phrase. Here are a few (okay, too many) that I especially liked:
• The English upper and upper-middle classes in the years surrounding the First and Second World Wars. . . were not as nice as we are, and they were much funnier.
• [Gibran’s The Prophet is a book] with margins you could drive a truck through—a selling point not to be dismissed.
• With Christie we are dealing not so much with a literary figure as with a broad cultural phenomenon like Barbie or the Beatles.
• Presumably as your child is nodding off you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of patriarchy.
• This seems a perfect example of psychoanalytic critics’ habitual indifference to the obvious
• The reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is.
• God, not Job, is the star of the book, and though he is not loving or fair that is part of the attraction.
• Robinson writes about religion two ways. One is meliorist, reformist. The other is rapturous, visionary. Many people have been good at the first kind; few, today, at the second kind. The second kind is Robinson’s forte.
• Pryor would not toe the line, any line, and we should honor him for this.
• It is the exploration of women’s mental underworld that makes [Ferrante’s Neapolitan series] so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed in all literature
• Not all of [Elmore Leonard’s novels] are on this level [of greatness], but five or six of them are, plus parts of many others. That’s a lot.
• There’s not a dirty joke in the world that he doesn’t think is funny.
• She was young, and she had only a few years of absolutely first-rank work, but that is true of many writers, including some of the greatest.
• Her father, Bronson Alcott, was an intellectual, or, in any case, a man who had thoughts.
• [Little Women] is not so much a novel, in the Henry James sense of the term, as a sort of wad of themes and scenes and cultural wishes. It is more like the Mahabharata or the Old Testament than it is like a novel. And that makes it an extraordinary novel.
• Something can suddenly appear in our lives—blood on the carpet, a letter without a return address—and after that nothing is ever the same.
• As regards eccentricity, funny how certain artists are that way. Don’t let this biographer loose on Gogol.
• Chalk it up to the culture wars and maybe also a concern for the bottom line, plus our old friend bad taste.
• This theme, of the blindness of European Jewish families to the actual mortal threat of the Fascists, has been sounded before, but rarely with such flair.
• Charles Darwin put forth a theory suggesting that human beings might be descended from lower animals, things with fur.
• With what must be the most robust erection in world literature …
• Before that the two young men were killing monsters and having sex—not such a different plotline from that of a modern action movie.
• The other day I tried to buy Tales Told by a Machine, from 1976. Amazon had a hardcover copy, for $967. This is a crime against art.
• Basically, anytime an organization needed someone to go, expenses paid, to a country that had crocodiles, [Graham Greene] was interested.
• After the Second World War, the Catholic Church would provide a suitably august arena for the transition to another sort of religion: doubt, anxiety, existentialism.
• In the twentieth century pity was hard to write about. That this dark-hearted man [Graham Greene] managed to—even that he tried—is surely a jewel in his crown.
• He [Francis Bacon] was not a discreet man, bless him, and his daily routine was widely known.
An advance copy in galley form via NetGalley.
I did not see all the illustrations that will be in the published book. They surely will enhance it.
My thanks to author and publisher.
Please note: Quotes taken from a galley may change in the final version.
(Opinions expressed here are my own.)
April 8, 2024
Just a lot of fun. A collection of fascinating things to know and think about.
December 31, 2024
Acocella is a very good writer, and a funny one at that. This is essentially a collection of book reviews for the New Yorker, most of them biographies and other nonfiction, and so they turn into character studies of a variety of artists and writers from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, with commentary on whether or not Acocella approves of how the biographer depicts them. I’m astonished at Acocella’s range: she deftly references ancient Sumerian poetry and surrealist postmodern Italian literature, while throwing in references to dance, painting, children’s book illustrations, and any other art medium you can think of. She must be an amazing dinner guest. I’m always amazed at people who not only have the time to consume this level of art, but people who are smart enough to write about it with this level of understanding and critique. She takes her job very seriously and her articles show it.
Reading this is a bit like reading the commentary of medieval monks on ancient manuscripts: you get a sense not only of the general “doctrine” of post-war cultural tastes (the New Yorker has its own doctrine to defend), but also a defense of Acocella’s individual taste, which is beyond reproach, and anyone who thinks (or overthinks, which is its own crime in this book) differently has simply not been catechized correctly. Much as Acocella pokes fun at academics, intellectuals, and overthinking artists (of which there are multitudes, to be sure), if you read this in one go, you also get a very clear sense of a woman who would hate it if someone turned their pen onto her writing life in 30 years.
Reading this is a bit like reading the commentary of medieval monks on ancient manuscripts: you get a sense not only of the general “doctrine” of post-war cultural tastes (the New Yorker has its own doctrine to defend), but also a defense of Acocella’s individual taste, which is beyond reproach, and anyone who thinks (or overthinks, which is its own crime in this book) differently has simply not been catechized correctly. Much as Acocella pokes fun at academics, intellectuals, and overthinking artists (of which there are multitudes, to be sure), if you read this in one go, you also get a very clear sense of a woman who would hate it if someone turned their pen onto her writing life in 30 years.
April 29, 2025
These were great, and went down a treat. I've never read her before. She's managed to convince me to try out one or two new authors, and I learned some interesting things about some very familiar authors.
What didn't happen was any inducement to read the books she was ostensibly writing about. These essays were mainly reviews about books about other people's books ... e.g. if Bill wrote a biography of Sheila, Joan would write about Sheila at great length, barely mentioning Bill, and for all I know she was getting 99% of her information from Bill's book. Or not. It wasn't clear. But by the end of each essay, I felt informed enough about Sheila's work, via Joan, that I lacked any desire to see what Bill might have had to say.
(Note: I'm a writer, so I suffer when I offer fewer than five stars. But these aren't ratings of quality, they're a subjective account of how much I liked the book: 5* = an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, 4* = really enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.)
What didn't happen was any inducement to read the books she was ostensibly writing about. These essays were mainly reviews about books about other people's books ... e.g. if Bill wrote a biography of Sheila, Joan would write about Sheila at great length, barely mentioning Bill, and for all I know she was getting 99% of her information from Bill's book. Or not. It wasn't clear. But by the end of each essay, I felt informed enough about Sheila's work, via Joan, that I lacked any desire to see what Bill might have had to say.
(Note: I'm a writer, so I suffer when I offer fewer than five stars. But these aren't ratings of quality, they're a subjective account of how much I liked the book: 5* = an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, 4* = really enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.)
August 3, 2024
My favourite pieces were the "critical profiles" of J. R. Ackerley, Elmore Leonard, Angela Carter, Edward Gorey, Natalia Ginzburg, Graham Greene, and Francis Bacon (and the one of Georges Simenon, except it wasn't included here).
December 1, 2024
I am not familiar with Acocella therefore, I may be missing some context, but all of these essays feel rather surface-level and like something someone on here (goodreads) could conjure up as a review. I don't mean this as a blow but rather because I expected more from a published collection of essays. The main reason I picked this up was for the writings on Dracula, Elena Ferrante, and Tolkien but I leave with the same emotions and knowledge as the ones I had going in.
March 11, 2024
What strikes one is the depth of research and reading that Acocella undertakes prior to writing an article... for example, she read every one of Agatha Christie's 63 novels before writing about her. She's a master of the long-form literary essay, and deserves to be widely read.
October 23, 2024
I came for the essay on Agatha Christie. I stayed for all the other essays, including ones about Dracula, the painter Francis Bacon, swearing, and many other topics. Plus one star for having an index.
May 19, 2024
Learned some things and added some books to my reading list after this.
September 5, 2024
Ebook. Too esoteric for me
June 9, 2024
I prefer the author’s reviews (mostly related to dance) preferable to this collection
October 7, 2024
I received this a digital galley from NetGalley.
This was my first taste of Joan Acocella and immediately made want to read more. Ladies named Joan love to write an essay eh?
This was my first taste of Joan Acocella and immediately made want to read more. Ladies named Joan love to write an essay eh?
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews