Steps

Jerzy Kosinski

dic 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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This National Book Award–winning novel of power, libido, and morality is “a powerful and profoundly disturbing book” (The New York Times).
 
First published in 1968, Jerzy Kosinski’s classic vision of moral and sexual estrangement captured the deviant undercurrents of the era’s politics and culture. In this haunting novel, distinctions are eroded between oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, narcissism and anonymity. Kosinski portrays men and women both aroused and desensitized by an environment that disdains the individual and seeks control over the imagination.
 
“Céline and Kafka stand behind this accomplished art” from the celebrated author of The Painted Bird and Being There (The New York Times Book Review).
 
“A collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever.” —David Foster Wallace
 
“Kosinski’s prose is perfect to his purpose, efficient, detached, lucid as a gem, wholly in command.” —The New York Times
 
“By some miracle of training, which recalls the linguistic bravado of Conrad and Nabokov, he is already a master of pungent and disciplined English prose. Simply as a stylist, Kosinski has few equals among American novelists born to the language. And I have also become convinced, after reading Steps, that he is one of the most gifted new figures to appear in our literature for some years.” —Irving Howe, Harper’s
 
“A beautifully written book. It is precise, scrupulous, and poetic. I can think of few writers who are able to so persuasively describe an event, set a scene, communicate an emotion.” —Geoffrey Wolff, New Leader

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Born on June 14, 1933, of Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta Kosinski in Lodz, Poland, Jerzy Kosinski came to the United States in 1957. He was naturalized in 1965. Kosinski obtained MA degrees in social sciences and history from the University of Lodz, and as a Ford Foundation Fellow completed his postgraduate studies in sociology at both the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and Columbia University in New York. He wrote The Future Is Ours, Comrade (1960) and No Third Path (1962), both collections of essays he published under the pen name of Joseph Novak. He is the author of the novels The Painted Bird (1965), Steps (1968), Being There (1971), The Devil Tree (first edition 1973, revised in 1981), Cockpit (1975), Blind Date (1977), Passion Play (1979), Pinball (1982), and The Hermit of 69th Street (1988). As a Guggenheim Fellow, Kosinski studied at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University; subsequently he taught American prose at Princeton and Yale universities. He then served the maximum two terms as president of the American Center of PEN, the international association of writers and editors. He was also a Fellow of Timothy Dwight College at Yale University. Kosinski founded and served as president of the Jewish Presence Foundation, based in New York. Kosinski won the National Book Award for Steps, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature, best Screenplay of the Year Award for Being There from both the Writers Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), the B'rith Shalom Humanitarian Freedom Award, the Polonia Media Award, the American Civil Liberties Union First Amendment Award and International House Harry Edmonds Life Achievement Award. He was a recipient of honorary PhDs in Hebrew letters from Spertus College of Judaica and in humane letters from both Albion College, Michigan (1988) and Potsdam College of New York State University (1989). An adept of photographic art, with one-man exhibitions to his credit in Warsaw's State Crooked Circle Gallery (1957), André Zarre Gallery in New York (1988), and in the Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago (1992), Kosinski was also an avid polo player and skier. In his film-acting debut in Warren Beatty's Reds, he portrayed Grigori Zinoviev, the Russian revolutionary leader. Kosinski died in New York on May 3, 1991.