What I Saw At The Fair [Paperback]

Ann Birstein’s account of her adventures in the New York male literary scene as a woman and as a female writer.

Ann Birstein is the author of 10 books, both fiction and non-fiction, which includeAmerican Children,Summer Situations, an autobiography,What I Saw at the Fair, and a biography of her father,The Rabbi on Forty-Seventh Street. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in theNew Yorker, theNew York Times,Vogue, and many other publications. Her grants and honors include a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has taught and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. At Barnard College, where she was a professor for many years, she founded and directed Writers on Writing.

“Fans of Birstein’s work in theNew Yorkerand theNew York Timeswill not be disappointed by this memoir. . . . Particularly entertaining are Birstein’s anecdotes of her family, school days and experiences during the 1940s, full of her trademark sardonic observations. . . . Birstein’s heartfelt recounting of the writer’s life, her turbulent marriage, her divorce from [Alfred Kazin] and later emergence as an influential scribe in her own right will elicit readers’ admiration.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Unsparing in her condemnation of the prevailing sexist attitudes of the times and Kazin’s selfishness and brutality, she is also laceratingly funny in her vehement characterizations of family, friends, and foes. This vinegary portrait of a tumultuous childhood and troubled marriage and scathing critique of an enormously influential but cutthroat literary milieu is entertainingly illuminating and understandably vindictive.” —Booklist