Calisher, Hortense (Vol. 2) | Calisher, Hortense 1911–
Calisher, Hortense 1911–
American novelist and short story writer. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)
Hortense Calisher is an American of European sympathies, taut artistry and stupendous talent. European culture in the very act of being déraciné—and letting out a mandrake shriek—is the motif Miss Calisher builds into a grand fugue in False Entry, published here last year, a huge novel you can nibble round for twenty or thirty pages before you are suddenly in, hurtling through its exciting plot, dazzled by its delicacy and stunned by its sheer Dickensian creativeness. Her effects are necessarily smaller but at their best just as cogent in Tale for the Mirror, which consists of thirteen stories, all bearing the marks of having had to earn their living. Literally, they are magazine stories: it is sad that the only one which could be called so derogatorily is the one from the New Yorker. The...
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