Books & Reading

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heightsAs novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from...

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heightsAs novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from...

In the second half of the twentieth century, American readers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – known as Sherlockians – worked together to create a ‘world of Sherlock Holmes’ that crossed the boundary between reality and fiction. This...

A legendary editor’s survey of the twentieth-century novel and how it shaped the fiction of the future'Edwin Frank’s masterly account of the novel gone modern and the modern gone global is a critical history of the last literary century. Epic, personal,...

How does a reader learn to read an unfamiliar genre? The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal answers this question by looking at the readers of some of the first Bengali novelists, including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Moving...

From a devoted reader and lifelong bookseller, an eloquent and charming reflection on the singular importance of bookstoresDo we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In this beautifully written book, Jeff Deutsch—the...

A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance libraryWith the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the...

A deep dive into the nature of translation from one of its most acclaimed practitioners Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award-winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what...

The significant archive of writing that came out of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good...

A beautifully illustrated guide to over seventy-five important journeys in world literature, spanning more than thirty countries and twenty-five hundred yearsFrom Homer’s Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Melville’s...

The novel has often been characterized as the art form without a form. Although there may not be any rules for how to write a novel, as Matthew Clark shows in his new work of practical analysis, a good novel is as carefully formed as a good poem.From...

The significant archive of writing that came out of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good...

From universities to governments, the Big Five publishers to Amazon, the influence of institutions abounds in US publishing. A diverse array of books from around the globe have been made into world literature in the US, selected by editors, publishers,...

In its February 1926 issue, Good Housekeeping magazine introduced a column for its approximately one million subscribers called “Tasting and Testing Books.” The column’s author, Emily Newell Blair, would go on to produce ninety-one reading advice columns...

Modern literary archives play a key role in how authors’ lives and works get canonized and consecrated as cultural heritage. This interdisciplinary volume combines literary studies, book history, textual criticism, heritage studies, archival theory, and...

From universities to governments, the Big Five publishers to Amazon, the influence of institutions abounds in US publishing. A diverse array of books from around the globe have been made into world literature in the US, selected by editors, publishers,...

This book sheds light on the contributions of architecture and its literary representations to a series of changes taking place in sexual culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, England, Germany and Austria. By...

If you like to write whether it s a pastime, a passion, or a profession you ve probably found yourself reading something brilliant and thinking, I could never do this! I might as well give up. But if there s one thing every great author has in common, it...

The novel has often been characterized as the art form without a form. Although there may not be any rules for how to write a novel, as Matthew Clark shows in his new work of practical analysis, a good novel is as carefully formed as a good poem.From...

In its February 1926 issue, Good Housekeeping magazine introduced a column for its approximately one million subscribers called “Tasting and Testing Books.” The column’s author, Emily Newell Blair, would go on to produce ninety-one reading advice columns...

Instead of making readers into better people, what if fiction could help us to become better animals? On Fiction and Being a Good Animal argues that we should abandon the persistent humanist idea that fiction can produce better people. Instead, we should...