Rocket and Lightship

"It is fashionable today to mourn the paucity of public intellectuals in America. Meet Adam Kirsch, one of the very best literary/cultural critics writing today-a critic in the grand tradition of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling. Rocket and Lightship is a delight to read." -- Marjorie Perloff "[Kirsch's] rare literary authority is on full display...It's a pleasure to be convoyed through Western literature by Kirsch, whose self-assuredness feels more like intellectual comfort than it does coercion." -- Alice Gregory - New York Times Book Review "Adam Kirsch is one of the best of our cultural and literary critics. Whether he is dispatching the repellent ideology of Slavoj Zizek or reappraising the literary legacy of E. M. Forster, he writes with stunning force and beautiful lucidity." -- Janet Malcolm "An adventurous critic and essayist of cascading impact... Kirsch's smart and piquant essays articulate reasons "to be grateful for literature," even as his whitewater title essay confronts us with the mad futility of our devotion to books." -- Donna Seaman - Booklist "Kirsch's writing is rarely overly zesty, it's lucid, forceful, and clear throughout-he doesn't wander, he walks." -- Michael Andor Brodeur - Boston Globe "One of the excitements of reading Kirsch on poetry is the sense that he still holds out this quixotic ambition for the form, never mind the current fashion." -- Christopher Beha - Harper's Magazine