Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a
charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist, "a literature-besotted
Midas of prose" (Cynthia Ozick). Now, American Audacity gathers a
selection of his most powerful considerations of American writers and
themes--a "gorgeous fury of language and sensibility" (Walter
Kirn)--including an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century
American literature, and a new appreciation of James Baldwin's genius
for nonfiction.
With potent insights into the storied tradition of American letters, and
written with a "commitment to the dynamism and dimensions of language,"
American Audacity considers giants from the past (Herman Melville,
Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee, Denis Johnson), some of our most well-known
living critics and novelists (Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe,
Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer), as well as those
cultural-literary themes that have concerned Giraldi as an American
novelist (bestsellers, the "problem" of Catholic fiction, the art of
hate mail, and his viral essay on bibliophilia).
Demanding that literature be audacious, and urgent in its convictions,
American Audacity is itself an act of intellectual daring, a
compendium shot through with Giraldi's "emboldened and emboldening
critical voice" (Sven Birkerts). At a time when literature is threatened
by ceaseless electronic bombardment, Giraldi argues that literature
"must do what literature has always done: facilitate those silent
spaces, remain steadfastly itself in its employment of slowness,
interiority, grace, and in its marshaling of aesthetic sophistication
and complexity."
American Audacity is ultimately an assertion of intelligence and
discernment from a maker of "perfectly paced prose" (The New Yorker),
a book that reaffirms the pleasure and wisdom of the deepest literary
values.
