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George Steiner at the New Yorker, by George Steiner

Edited, and with an Introduction, by Robert Boyers

An education in a portmanteau: George Steiner at The New Yorker collects his best work from his more than 150 pieces for the magazine.

“A keenly discriminating literary mind.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A remarkably powerful writer.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

“The essence of Steiner’s magic—I don’t really know what else to call it —has been his singular ability to articulate and elucidate, through nuance, allusion, and a peerless precision of language, those Phoebus-rays of wisdom that lie beyond wisdom and almost always elude words….” —Nick Tosches, Bookforum

Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to “the common reader.” He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children’s games, war-time Britain, Hitler’s bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising.

George Steiner, author of dozens of books (The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Heidegger, In Bluebeard’s Castle), is Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Robert Boyers is Editor of the quarterly Salmagundi, Director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute, Professor of English at Skidmore College, and an author.

Also from New Directions by Steiner: My Unwritten Books, ISBN 978-0-8112-1703-3