About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux

ISBN-100374148600

ISBN-139780374148607

eBay Product ID (ePID)879275

Product Key Features

Book TitleEx Libris : Confessions of a Common Reader

Number of Pages162 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year1998

TopicBooks & Reading, Essays

GenreLiterary Criticism, Literary Collections

AuthorAnne Fadiman

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight8.6 Oz

Item Length7.7 in

Item Width5.9 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN98-021109

Reviews"A smart little book that one can happily welcome into the family and allow to start growing old." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "A book for bookworms . . . 18 stylish, dryly humorous essays"--Entertainment Weekly, "A smart little book that one can happily welcome into the family and allow to start growing old." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "A book for bookworms . . . 18 stylish, dryly humorous essays"-- Entertainment Weekly, "A smart little book that one can happily welcome into the family and allow to start growing old." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,The New York Times "A book for bookworms . . . 18 stylish, dryly humorous essays"--Entertainment Weekly

Dewey Edition21

Dewey Decimal028.9/092

SynopsisAnne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice. This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony--Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

LC Classification NumberPN4874.F33 1998