Preface -- Art over biology -- Darwinism at 150 -- Francis Fukuyama and the beginning of history -- The last men: Houellebecq, Sebald, McEwan -- Under the volcano: Giacomo Leopardi -- Up from cynicism: Peter Sloterdijk -- The deadly jester: Slavoj Ε½iΕΎek -- Still the good war -- Beware of pity: Hannah Arendt -- The interpreter: Walter Benjamin -- Alfred Kazin's clamor -- Susan Sontag's seriousness -- The importance of being earnest: David Foster Wallace -- The lesson of the master: Cynthia Ozick -- Liberation and liberalism: E.M. Forster -- Zadie Smith and the future of the novel -- The turbulence of Saul Bellow -- Proust between halachah and aggadah -- Rocket and lightship.;"A collection of essays from a "great poet-critic-intellectual" (Daily Beast). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last seven years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, renowned American critic Adam Kirsch explores the intersection of literature with larger questions about ideas, history, and society. Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute ... [a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and lives of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E.M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G.M. Hopkins: "Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone." So, according to Kirsch, shines literature: as an unattainable speed, as a moving beacon. Taken together, the provocative and bold essays in Rocket and Lightship show how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art"--