Books & Reading

Can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by...

Continuum Contemporaries give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed, and most influential novels of recent years. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been...

After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently...

Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolano's work into English, explores the singular...

How to Read provides guidance and reflections on the love and enjoyment of books. Engaging and enlightening, this well-rounded collection includes Lewis' reflections on science fiction, why children's literature is for readers of all ages, and why we...

'A brilliant, unlikely book' SpectatorHow can we celebrate, challenge and change our remarkable world? In 2012, the world arrived in London for the Olympics...and Ann Morgan went out to meet it. She read her way around all the globe's 196 independent...

This book is a compact guide to reading plays, and to the art and techniques of drama. Ranging from classical Greece to modern Drama and performance, but with particular emphasis on the playwrights (including Shakespeare) who are most widely taught and...

A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia "Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history."-Kirkus Reviews For centuries, premodern...

What would an anatomy of the book look like? There is the main text, of course, the file that the author proudly submits to their publisher. But around this, hemming it in on the page or enclosing it at the front and back of the book, there are dozens of...

Reading for Life is an anthology of poems and of extracts from prose fiction, related to a series of case-histories of individuals carefully reading, discussing their reading lives, and thinking about the relation of literature to their existence. It...

In her powerful opening essays - 'Fathers', 'Forefathers' and 'Ancestors' - A. S. Byatt considers the renaissance of the historical novel and discusses particularly the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British...

With a foreword by Lee Child.Andy Martin spent a year in the company of Lee Child, creator of tough-guy hero Jack Reacher. With Child is the diary of their adventures, tracking the publication and reception of Make Me, the writing of Night School at an...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781945492426Author Mary CappelloFormat PaperbackPage Count 136Imprint Transit BooksPublisher Transit Books

Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary British women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789198871197Author Katrina MakkoukFormat PaperbackPage Count 44Imprint Trapart BooksPublisher Trapart BooksWeight(grams) 77g

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative...

In The Codex, published in 1954, C.H. Roberts studied the process by which in the early centuries of our era the roll as the vehicle for literature was replaced by the codex, which has remained the format of the book ever since. New evidence that has...

There they sit, the great tomes of classical literature, taunting you with their length and difficulty, as you ask: which books are the most important and why - and what's actually any good? Why does most writing about the classics have words like...

In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's most substantial work since...

'Nobody writes like Sally Bayley' Lemn Sissay From the brilliantly original and critically acclaimed Sally Bayley, a literary story of working class childhood, absent or broken men and the power of literature to save and rebuild...

Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book AwardA defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon-and gaining new appreciation-amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and...

Works of genre fiction are a source of enjoyment, read during cherished leisure time and in incidental moments of relaxation. This original book takes readers inside popular genres of fiction, including crime, fantasy, and romance, to reveal how personal...

A remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations, Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed. Books have long captured the imagination of readers everywhere, commanding their love, earning their...

'In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . .' Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally best-selling novelist Paul Auster now remembers the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781400033188Author Jane SmileyFormat PaperbackPage Count 608Imprint Alfred A. KnopfPublisher Alfred A. KnopfWeight(grams) 413g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062720733Author Clifton FadimanFormat PaperbackPage Count 400Imprint HarperCollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781597523141Author Dr Leland RykenFormat PaperbackPage Count 284Imprint Wipf & Stock PublishersPublisher Wipf & Stock PublishersWeight(grams)...

From "the man on whom nothing was lost," a unique guide to the elements of statecraft, presented through spirited interpretations of classic literary works "The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm," writes Charles...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781733522120Author Joseph PearceFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Ignatius PressPublisher Ignatius Press

An intimate and exhilarating journey through the world of books by the internationally celebrated author In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called "the Casanova of reading," argues that the activity of...

It's time to diversify your reading list. This richly illustrated and vastly inclusive collection uplifts the works of authors who are often underrepresented in the literary world. Using their keen knowledge and deep love for all things literary,...

The emergence of the book was not merely an event of world historical importance, but the dawn of modernity. In this much praised work, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin mesh together economic and technological history, sociology and anthropology, with...

What is fanfiction, and what is it not? Why does fanfiction matter? And what makes it so important to the future of literature? Fic is a groundbreaking exploration of the history and culture of fan writing and what it means for the way we think about...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781984898432Author Harold BloomFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA Inc

Linda Hutcheon, in this original study, examines the modes, forms and techniques of narcissistic fiction, that is, fiction which includes within itself some sort of commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic nature. Her analysis is further...

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years,...

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Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780394700137Author Stuart GilbertFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm) 171mm *...

The response to Nancy Pearl's surprise bestseller Book Lust was astounding: the Seattle librarian even became the model for the now-famous Librarian Action Figure. Readers everywhere welcomed Pearl's encyclopedic but discerning filter on books worth...

Related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists and has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. In this thoroughly...