A Word or Two Before I Go - by Arthur Krystal (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A collection of eleven essays and one story by the acclaimed essayist Arthur Krystal. Topics range from literary figures to sports figures to cultural appropriation to aging"--

Book Synopsis

Praise for Arthur Krystal:

"Arthur Krystal's essays shine like a searchlight through the fog of contemporary culture. Vivid, sharp, and enlightening, they keep a steady keel through roiling waters."--Edward Mendelson, Lionel Trilling Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University

"Krystal celebrates the author compelled to write by a sense of mortality and the critic qualified to judge literature by traits of temperament and taste.... And as his vibrant, well-considered essays reveal, Krystal has not entirely relinquished hope that 'books, despite the critics' polemics, are still the truest expressions of the human condition.'"--Elizabeth Mary Sheehan, New York Times Book Review

"Arthur Krystal's mind and style manage to flourish in a postmodern culture where literature has--in his fine phrasing--'become the center that is somehow beside the point.'"--Thomas Mallon

Although Arthur Krystal shies away from the title of essayist, his essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Moreover, such dissimilar critics as Dana Gioia, Morris Dickstein, Edward Mendelson, Christopher Hitchens, and Joseph Epstein have all lauded his work. And his first book, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay.

Accolades aside, Krystal simply regards himself as someone who writes sentences to see where they take him. In A Word or Two Before I Go, Krystal offers us--if he is to be believed--his final collection. These eleven essays and one evocative story range in subject matter from the depredations of aging and the anomalies of cultural appropriation to the friendship between Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling and the day Muhammad Ali punched Krystal in the face.

Review Quotes

[Arthur Krystal] is smart, entertaining, and provocative. A down-to-earth intellectual with an effective strategically placed style of conversational understatement and charm. And a history of wanting his iconoclastic non-fiction to make a difference in the way we think and act . . . Krystal is heir to the familiar or informal essay, a genre going back to William Hazlitt in the early 19th century that reflects an evolving metaphysical and personal rumination on ordinary ideas, playing with them, rethinking them in prose that knows when to slip from complex to colloquial.--Joan Baum "WSHU Public Radio"

Arthur Krystal is an essayist of grace, range, and depth. . . . The subjects that he embraces range from contemporary poetry to the challenges of aging to legendary sports figures. Whatever his subject, we're right there with Krystal as he explores some of the highways and byways of the world around him. His work here bears comparison with other contemporary essayists who work in an exploratory spirit, including James Wolcott (Critical Mass), Zadie Smith (Changing My Mind), and the late Christopher Hitchens (Arguably). . . . I'm confident that readers who have followed Krystal's writing in The New Yorker and other publications will be eager to see some of their favorite essays gathered together in a permanent form.--National Magazine Award-winning journalist Wyatt Mason

Krystal's witty and generous essay collection purports to be his last, a dénouement to a long career of writing "sentences that lead to other sentences," many in the pages of this magazine. In one essay, Krystal recalls getting clocked in the face by Muhammad Ali in 1991 on a bus driving down Interstate 78. In the book's finale, a short story, an aging man regards his life as a composite of moments stretched and compressed, probing time's capacity to blunt and to sharpen. In this collection, Krystal sifts through his essays and criticism in kind, mulling the stuff that makes life and literature.-- "The New Yorker"

An essayist, besides being able to write, should possess 'a well-stocked mind, ' leaving open the question of what it is stocked with. Consider, for example, Arthur Krystal's A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now, which opens with a pleasing air of wry despondency. . . . This Eeyore-like plangency runs softly throughout Krystal's pages but dominates the superb 'Old News: Why We Can't Tell the Truth About Aging' . . . . Other essays in this companionable book include an appreciation of the poet John Ashbery; reminiscences of Krystal's teacher, mentor and friend Jacques Barzun; reflections on the books that shaped his mind and taste; meditations on boxing; and -- daring greatly--a thoughtfully balanced answer to the question 'Is Cultural Appropriation Ever Appropriate?'--Michael Dirda "The Washington Post"

About the Author

Arthur Krystal is the author of four previous books of essays, including This Thing We Call Literature, and the editor of A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling--From the Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs.