Antiquities and Other Stories

‘A writer innately drawn to paradox, and to the moral questions inherent in the relationships between richness and poverty, mind and body, history and imagination’ Ali Smith

‘As cunning and rich as anything Ozick’s written’ Wall Street Journal

‘One of our era’s central writers. About a man ensnared by history, Antiquities is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are’ The New Yorker

‘Ozick’s prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave’ New York Review of Books

I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing.

In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie returns as a Trustee to the long-defunct boarding school that he attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir about the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school, about his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, about the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil.

In this novella, and the three stories published alongside it, one of our most preeminent writers weaves together myth and mania, history and illusion to capture the shifting meanings of the past.

A W&N Essential