Anatole Broyard

Anatole Broyard, long-time book critic, book review editor, and essayist for the New York Times, wants to be remembered. He will be, with this collection of irreverent, humorous essays he wrote concerning the ordeals of life and deathmany of which were written during the battle with cancer that led to his death in 1990. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A heartbreakingly eloquent and unsentimental meditation on mortality . . . Some writing is so rich and well-spoken that commentary is superfluous, even presumptuous. . . . Read this book, and celebrate a cultured spirit made fine, it seems, by the coldest of touches.Los Angeles TimesSucceeds brilliantly . . . Anatole Broyard has joined his father but not before leaving behind a legacy rich in wisdom about the written word and the human condition. He has died. But he lives as a writer and we are the wealthier for it.The Washington Post Book WorldA virtuoso performance . . . The central essays of Intoxicated By My Illness were written during the last fourteen months of Broyards life. They are held in a gracious setting of his previous writings on death in life and literature, including a fictionalized account of his own fathers dying of cancer. The title refers to his reaction to the knowledge that he had a life-threatening illness. His literary sensibility was ignited, his mind flooded with image and metaphor, and he decided to employ these intuitive gifts to light his way into the darkness of his disease and its treatment. . . . Many other people have chronicled their last months . . . Few are as vivid as Broyard, who brilliantly surveys a variety of books on illness and death along the way as he draws us into his writers imagination, set free now by what he describes as the deadline of life. . . . [A] remarkable book, a lively man of dense intelligence and flashing wit who lets go and yet at the same time comtains himself in the style through which he remains alive.The New York Times Book ReviewDespite much pain, Anatole Broyard continued to write until the final days of his life. He used his writing to rage, in the words of Dylan Thomas, against the dying of the light. . . . Shocking, no-holds-barred and utterly exquisite.The Baltimore Sun

El libro recoge los escritos que Broyard, crítico y director del New York Times Book Review, escribió a partir del momento en que le diagnostican cáncer de próstata hasta pocos días antes de su muerte. Se trata de una lúcida reflexión, no exenta de humor y descaro, sobre el hecho de estar enfermo. Entre los textos se recoge "Lo que dijo la cistoscopia" (del que Philip Roth dijo en una carta: "...No sale a cuenta ni siquiera para escribir un relato tan espléndido como «Lo que dijo la cistoscopia», no al menos mientras Aristófanes no sea Dios".) Oliver Sacks es el autor del prólogo del libro.

What Hemingways A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost bohemia. We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Streetindulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as living off the land or sailing around the world while exercizing his libido with a protegee of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis. Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.