No Other Book: Selected Essays

Called "the most exhilarating critic America has produced" (Kirkus Reviews), Randall Jarrell persists as a brilliant, funny, innovative force in contemporary criticism. Edited by Brad Leithauser and distilled from four books of criticism, No Other Book contains the best of Jarrell's critical essays, which illuminate and define his inimitable way of thinking. The essays he wrote over the course of three decades -- in which he mingled his assessments of poetry and prose with the occasional cri de coeur over the state of American civilization -- always escort the reader directly into the inner sanctum of the work at hand with scintillating, comical brilliance. No other poet has ever written about his art with such electricity and intelligence, which makes No Other Book a true literary treasure.