Readings; Essays & Literary Entertainments

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. x, [2], 216 [8] pages. Frontis illustration. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Signed by the author. on the title page. Intimate, humorous, and insightful, Readings is a collection of classic essays and reviews by Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. From a first reading of Beckett and Faulkner at the feet of an inspirational high-school English teacher to a meeting of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, from an obsession with Nabokov's Lolita to the discovery of the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, these essays chronicle a lifetime of literary enjoyment. Michael Dirda (born 1948) is a book critic for the Washington Post. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree in 1970, Dirda took an M.A. in 1974 and Ph.D. in 1977 from Cornell University in comparative literature. In 1978 Dirda started writing for the Washington Post; in 1993 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism. Currently, he is a book columnist for the Post. This volume collects Dirda's popular column published in the Washington Post Book World in the 1990s. Throughout, Dirda shares his passion for reading with humor, scholarship, and imagination. He's full of ideas about what to read next, and brings lively infatuation to the art of the book review. Derived from a Kirkus review: A delightful compendium of Dirda's most memorable Washington Post Book World essays revels in seven years' worth of bibliophilic passion. Although the 46 "literary entertainments" collected here range widely in topic and in tone, Dirda's hearty enthusiasm and good-natured bookishness stands at the forefront of his writing. From pulp fiction to serious literature, children's books to erotica, ghost stories to classics in translation, Dirda appears to have read more books—and to remember them in awe-inspiring detail—than most libraries contain. Many of the essays contain lists of little-known and forgotten novels with brief synopses of their contents, and these simple gifts leave one breathless with reverence for the man who read, recommended, and loved these countless titles. Dirda's erudition is obvious throughout. His response to required reading in high school and his hilarious suggestions to encourage children to read by forbidding them the classics reveal a man whose tongue may be firmly in his cheek but whose heart and mind never seem to stray from the joys of the printed word. The the joy of Dirda's opinions lies in letting the voice and wit of a true bibliophile into your head.