Surviving

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681374123
Pages: 328
Publication Date: March 19, 2020

The written word is estranging, and Green liked it that way. He famously wrote that prose should offer "a gathering web of insinuations . . . a long intimacy between strangers," but that intimacy should above all be silent. . . . His radio broadcasts have a touch of the manifesto about them, as if laying down a path for the novel of the future, a way to capture something we’ve lost, some sense of "what never can be said."
—Michael Gorra

With Green, we’re presented with a singular kind of artist who, like the poets of ancient India and Greece, has nothing to offer us but delight.
—Amit Chaudhuri

The experience of reading Green, or so I find, is far more animating than the ordinary reading experience and extends far beyond the usual confines: It can be almost physical, as if the thought or sensation expressed on the page were being generated by one’s own, not the author’s mind. . . . One is mesmerized, thrilled, transported, often by the very recklessness entailed by an underlying and urgent purity of vision.
—Deborah Eisenberg

Nearer than almost any other to the spirit and what might be called the central nerve of our time.
—Elizabeth Bowen

The most gifted prose writer of his generation.
—V.S. Pritchett

One of the few really considerable English novelists of our time.
—Angus Wilson

I realized that in the used bookstore I had conflated the name of Julien Green, the French American novelist who inspired Highsmith, with that of Henry James, whom she imitated, to arrive by surprise at one of the great writers in English: Henry Green, who made his work with these kinds of mishearings, and of whom I had never even heard.
—Sarah Nicole Prickett, Bookforum