In our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic age, are we sacrificing our literary culture? Renowned critic Sven Birkerts believes the answer is an alarming yes. In The Gutenberg Elegies, he explores the impact of technology on the experience of reading. Drawing on his own passionate, lifelong love of books, Birkerts examines how literature intimately shapes and nourishes the inner life. What does it mean to "hear" a book on audiotape, decipher...

A pathbreaking work about the way literature teaches us to use our imagination. We often attribute to our imaginative life powers that go beyond ordinary perception or sensation. In Dreaming by the Book, the noted scholar Elaine Scarry explores the apparently miraculous but in fact understandable processes by which poets and writers confer those powers on us: how they teach us the work of imaginative creation. Writers from Homer to Heaney, Scarry...

In 1972 Mark Moskowitz read a New York Times book review of "The stones of summer" by Dow Mossman, a title which, later in Moskowitz's life would later become an object of obsession. Though he shelved the book for 25 years, Moskowitz finally read it and was amazed at its ingenuity. He was shocked that its one-time author never penned another book. Determined to solve the mystery, Moskowitz documented his research project in finding the forgotten author...

"Fans of Lee Child know well that the muscular star of his bestselling novels, Jack Reacher, is a man of few words--and a lot of action. In Reacher Said Nothing, Andy Martin shadows Child like a literary private eye in a yearlong investigation of what it takes to make fiction's hottest hero hit the page running. The result is a fascinating, up-close-and-personal look into the world and ways of an expert storyteller's creative process as he undertakes...

"The author traces the significant yet underappreciated historical role that mass-market paperbacks of Jane Austen's books have played in making her the celebrated author she is today. This is a work of bibliography and of literary history. The author has amassed a large collection of rare and forgotten Austen volumes with rich, colorful, and sometimes gaudy covers that are featured, selectively, as figures in the book"--

In his bestselling What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, Daniel Pool brilliantly unlocked the mysteries of the English novel. Now, in his long-awaited Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters, Pool turns his keen eye to England's great Victorian novelists themselves, to reveal the surprisingly human private side of their public genius. Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters explores the outrageous publicity stunts,...