Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers a stunning proposal for a new way of thinking about the way we read.

Fish begins by examining the relation between a reader and a text, arguing against the formalist belief that the text alone is the basic, knowable, neutral, and unchanging component of literary experience. But in arguing for the...

New York Times Bestseller

"Both deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style" - Adam Haslett, Financial Times

"A guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language." - Slate

"Like a long periodic sentence, this book rumbles along, gathers steam, shifts gears, and packs a wallop."
--Roy Blount Jr.

In this entertaining and erudite New York Times bestseller, beloved professor Stanley Fish offers both sentence...