Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

Agnes's Final Afternoon imitates the protagonist of Milan Kundera's novel Immortality on the last afternoon of her life. Like all readers of fiction, Agnes steps out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. Francois Ricard's essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores includes a chain of ten novels, composed between 1959 and 1999, and two books containing one of the most lucid reflections on the...

In his national bestseller, A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes explored the sweet obsession people feel to possess books. Now, Basbanes continues his adventures among the -gently mad- on an irresistible journey to the great libraries of the past -- from Alexandria to Glastonbury -- and to contemporary collections at the Vatican, Wolfenbuttel, and erudite universities. Along the way, he drops in on eccentric book dealers and regales us with stories about unforgettable collectors, such as the gentleman who bought a rare book in 1939 -by selling bottles of his own...

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have -made things happen- in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people.

In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass,...

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of...

They say you can't judge a book by its cover--but its title can tell you more than you ever needed to know

Amazing, illuminating, and gut-bustingly funny, Bizarre Books is the wonderfully twisted product of more than two decades of determined searching in forgotten corners of out-of-the-way libraries and through the literary detritus of eclectic private collections. It is certain to delight every true fan of trivia and the patently absurd.

"A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and readers competed for power over the printed page. . . . The richness of Mr. Johns's book lies in the splendid detail he has collected to describe the world of books in the first two centuries after the printing press arrived in England."--Alberto Manguel, Washington Times

" A] mammoth and...