After the last page is turned and the cover closed on a great book, is it really over? Ever wonder what happens to Harry Potter after, say, twenty years of marriage and a steady government gig? Or what Karl Marx would say about today’s financial crisis? What did Scarlett O-Hara really think about tomorrow? What comes after ever-after? BOOK: The Sequel dares to answer these burning questions with imagined first sentences from would-be follow-ups to classics from The Bible to Lord of the Rings, and from Green Eggs to Hamlet.
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Rare-book theft is even more widespread than fine-art theft. Most thieves, of course, steal for profit. John Charles Gilkey steals purely for the love of books. In an attempt to understand him better, journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett plunged herself into the world of book lust and discovered just how dangerous it can be.
Gilkey is an obsessed, unrepentant book thief who has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rare books from book fairs, stores, and libraries around the country. Ken Sanders is the self-appointed “bibliodick” (book dealer with a penchant for detective work) driven to catch him.
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The author of the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind returns with The Angel’s Game , a dazzling portrait of Barcelona in the 1920s–and a labyrinth of allies and villains, lovers and legends who take us on a wondrous literary adventure. The millions of readers who savored The Shadow of the Wind will delight in being transported to familiar haunts–including the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the bookshop founded by the Sempere family–while discovering a previous generation of characters. Those who are experiencing the fiction of Carlos Ruiz Zafón for the first time will find themselves mesmerized by the dangerous liaisons brewing in The Angel’s Game.
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Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions — why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen — it doesn’t matter. The key is the act of reading, the seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book,
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Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce?
It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys,
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From the editor of the popular Annotated Pride and Prejudice comes an annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Emma that makes her beloved tale of an endearingly inept matchmaker an even more satisfying read. Here is the complete text of the novel with more than 2,200 annotations on facing pages, including:
Explanations of historical context
Citations from Austen’s life, letters, and other writings
Definitions and clarifications
Literary comments and analysis
Maps of places in the novel
An introduction, bibliography, and detailed chronology of events
Nearly 200 informative illustrations
Filled with fascinating information about everything from the social status of spinsters and illegitimate children to the shopping habits of fashionable ladies to English attitudes toward gypsies,
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