The Marvin Mudrick collection has introductions written by his former editor, a colleague from his days of writing for the Hudson Review, and three former students (including Berkshire’s CEO Karen Christensen).
In On Culture and Literature Marvin Mudrick explores the work of major figures in a wide range of fields: literature, political and musical criticism, autobiography, the novel and science.
In this thoughtful appraisal of the novels and writings of Jane Austen, Mr. Mudrick shows her to be a writer of acute and irreverent sensibilities who, despite the constricted circumstances of her life, managed to create in her novels an enduring microcosm of the larger world.
A collection such as Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? is an invitation to meet some of them. We meet heroes and monsters and plenty of people in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics.
Mudrick Transcribed contains riveting and comical dialogue from transcripts made in the early 1980s of Marvin Mudrick's classes and talks. “A one-man commando squad and independent operator, Marvin Mudrick was the most maverick literary critic of his time and ours—ferocious, funny, and fearlessly honest," says James Wolcott of Vanity Fair.
The Man in the Machine consists of new assessments of major writers and critics by the author of whose last book Roger Sale wrote: "T. S. Eliot was not so good a reviewer as Marvin Mudrick is."
The man the Village Voice called "the Mickey Spillane of Belles Lettres" and the Washington Post called a "literary curmudgeon, randy iconoclast, and a delight" outdoes himself in his fifth book, an outrageous and virtuoso display of literary and historical portraiture.