Ear Training (Literary Essays)

“These pieces reflect Pritchard’s abiding joy in literature, especially poetry … Included here are insightful appreciations of Anthony Trollope, Anthony Powell, and a sublime reading of Philip Larkin. His essay on Elizabeth Bishop will have poetry lovers reaching for volumes of her work. Pritchard is particularly strong in his evaluations of other critics, including Edmund Wilson, Hugh Kenner, and especially, Clive James … Pritchard is demanding, fastidious, and occasionally cantankerous, yet in a refreshing way that reminds readers what it means to care deeply about literature."
—Booklist

Ear Training gathers thirty essays and reviews by one of America’s most playful critics.

Known for his long career as a professor and writer of critical biographies, for this collection William H. Pritchard has selected some of his favorite shorter pieces on a wide range of topics. United by Pritchard’s philosophy of literature, which he calls “ear training”, pieces on subjects from John Updike to Emily Dickinson to Frank Sinatra to the soap opera The Young and the Restless urge us to consider how literature sounds and how a sense of play in our approach to the world can uncover buried truths and meanings. Also included are the series of letters Pritchard wrote to his students in the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, meant to offer commentary on four English writers—Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Throughout the collection Pritchard urges the reader to engage with texts he has found particularly delightful and illuminating, taking us on a tour of the world as he has heard it through poetry, prose, music, and the voices of people he has known.