Cynthia Ozick Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Short Story Anthologies

Publication Order of Anthologies

Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick was born April 17, 1928 in New York City. She is the second of two kids, and was raised in the Bronx by parents William and Celia (nee Regelson) Ozick. They were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood.

Cynthia went to Hunter College High School in Manhattan. She earned a BA from New York University and went on to study at Ohio State University, where she finished her MA in English Literature, focusing on Henry James novels.

She was married to Bernard Hallote, an attorney, until his death in 2017. Rachel Hallote, their daughter, is professor of history at SUNY Purchase and the head of its Jewish studies program. Cynthia is the niece of Abraham Regelson, the Hebraist.

Her essays and fiction are often about Jewish American life, however she also writes about history, politics, and literary criticism. She has also translated and written poetry.

Ozick describes writing as being a sort of hallucinatory madness. You’ll do it no matter what, you just can’t not do it. Ozick views the freedom in the delectable sense of making things up as coexisting with the torment of writing.

In 1971, she received the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for “The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories”, a short story collection. “Bloodshed and Three Novellas” also won The National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. In 1997, she won the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for “Fame and Folly”. Four of her stories won first prize in the O. Henry competition.

In 1986, she was chosen as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2000, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for “Quarrel and Quandary”. Ozick was awarded that PEN/Malamud Award and the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2008. “Foreign Bodies” was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize and the Orange Prize.

“The Puttermesser Papers” is a stand alone novel that was released in 1997. With dashing originality and in prose which sings like a whole choir of sirens, Cynthia relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermasser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental, while her love life is minimal. And her fantasies have this disconcerting tendency to actually come true, with some disastrous consequences for what we laughably refer to as “reality”.

Puttermesser yearns to have a daughter and promptly creates one for herself, unassisted, in the form of the very first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams about reforming the city, and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and gets hurtled into it headlong, just to find that paradise found is paradise lost as well.

Lambent with wit, overflowing with ideas, this novel is a tour de force by one of America’s most visionary novelists. In 1997, the novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award.

“The Bear Boy” is a stand alone novel that was released in 2005. This is a story specific to place and time, and about the dislocation of place and time as well. It’s set in 1935 at the sole moment in history when the idea of socialism flickered to life in America, when Jewish intellectuals were fleeing from the country where they were once respected professors and writers, and when a great many people were equal to one another in that the majority had little material wealth.

The oversize Mitwisser clan are German refugees that survive at the whim of James Albair, their vagabond benefactor. James is the heir to the fortune amassed by his dad, the author of this wildly popular series of kids’ books called “The Bear Boy”. James is feckless, has money to burn, and wayward, and he has taken up the eccentric Mitwissers: invalid wife, scholarly patriarch, and five scrappy kids, as his latest caprice.

Into this chaotic household comes Rose Meadows, who was orphaned when she was 18. Rose soon becomes indispensable as assistant to Professor Mitwisser in his research on this arcane sect and then, inevitably, as general nursemaid, nanny, and a companion to the whole family. Her sole inheritance is this book: the first in the “Bear Boy” series.

Then when the actual Bear Boy shows up on the Mitwisser doorstep, Rose has to resist the pull of his reckless orbit while she pursues desires of her own. The Bear Boy evokes Depression-era New York from the point of view of perpetual outsiders. Brought together by fate and coincidence, the hard times that they inherit still hold glimmers of past wonders and future dreams.

“Foreign Bodies” is a stand alone novel that was released in 2010. At the core of this story is Bea Nightingale, a 50ish divorced schoolteacher whose life’s been on hold during the many years since her short marriage. Her difficult and estranged brother asks her to leave New York to head to Paris in order to retrieve this nephew that she hardly knows, she gets entangled in the lives of her brother’s family and even, after so very long, her former husband. Every single one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months of this fateful year.

Traveling from New York to Paris and then to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her niece and nephew as she wages a war of letters with her brother, facing off against her former husband and at last shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, she is a newly liberated divorcee that inadvertently wreaks havoc on the same people that she attempts to help.

This might just be Cynthia Ozick’s greatest and her most virtuosic novel of all of them, since it transforms Henry James’ prototype of “The Ambassadors” into such a brilliant and utterly original, new American classic.

For this novel, Cynthia set herself a brilliant challenge, to retell “The Ambassadors”, the work that he considered to be his best, but as a photographic negative, which means the plot is the same, but the meaning’s reversed.