Rocket and Lightship Essays on Literature and Ideas

In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last seven years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, renowned American critic Adam Kirsch explores the intersection of literature with larger questions about ideas, history, and society. Kirsch has been described as 'elegant and astute . . . [a] critic of the very first order' (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and lives of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: 'Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone.' So, according to Kirsch, shines literature: as an unattainable speed, as a moving beacon.