📖 Except When I Write. Reflections of a Recovering Critic

Writing of Arthur Krystal's Agitations Morris Dickstein noted that, Whether he is writing literary essays that wear their learning lightly or familiar essays that breathe the spirit of Montaigne and Hazlitt, Arthur Krystal's work is a pleasure to read. An opinion shared by Dana Gioia, the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who described Krystal's The Half-Life of an American Essayist as a superb book, winning the rare literary trifecta of being well-written, well-reasoned, and well-researched. [The essays] are not only a pleasure to read one by one they are a pleasure to read paragraph by paragraph. In "Except When I Write", whose title piece is included in the Best American Essays of 2010, Krystal continues to shore up his chosen genre. In prose that is elegant, entertaining, and adroit, he offers distinctive views on such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, William Hazlitt, Jacques Barzun, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book concludes with a charming capstone essay concerning his own gravitation toward the essay form. If Krystal has one rule for writing, it is a line that Hazlitt overheard on the street and took to heart: Confound it, man, don't be insipid. No fear of that. As Library Journal and other publications have noticed, Krystal has a seeming inability to pull any punches. Why should you read him? Because when critics, whose political views differ as sharply as those of Jacques Barzun and Christopher Hitchens, or Joseph Epstein and Michael Dirda, agree about the merits of one contemporary essayist, something unusual must be going on. Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, may have said it best: Arthur Krystal's essays shine like a searchlight through the fog of contemporary culture.