Here are 44 books that What We Talk about When We Talk about Books fans have personally recommended if you like
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As an avid reader, I'm curious about where books come from and what they do. How does a story get to be a book? How does someone become an author? What is happening to us as we read? I worked in publishing, and eventually, I started teaching other people how to become editors and publishers. As a faculty member, I had time to study and write about book history. I joined the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing when it was formed and became its president. The conferences helped me to learn about the history of books throughout the world and from pre-print times to the present.
I always like to start learning about a subject with an overview, and this book brings together experts on topics ranging from technology to censorship, marketing, copyright, and book clubs in the period starting with World War II. I turn to this volume, again and again, to refresh my knowledge and enjoy excellent writing by the top scholars in book history. Earlier volumes in the series cover the topic from colonial times.
This is the only comprehensive, interpretive survey of the history of the book in the United States since 1945.The fifth volume of ""A History of the Book in America"" addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier.The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business…
Books—broadly defined as any kind of written or printed document—are the primary means by which civilizations are constructed, memories are preserved, ideas are communicated, wealth is distributed, and power is exercised. To understand any human society, you must read its books. And as Winston Churchill said, “Books last forever.” The physical structures of civilizations eventually crumble into ruins, but the books they leave behind are immortal.
More than a century before Oprah, emancipated African Americans organized their own book clubs. They studied mainly the Western classics but also emerging black writers.
While Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational training, more militant black leaders demanded the right to read the same authors taught in elite white academies: One of their syllabuses included Milton, Spenser, Homer, Aeschylus, Longfellow, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Pindar and Sappho. Those poets, said one reader, inspired the "hope [that] the great American epic of the joys and sorrows of our blood and kindred, of those who have gone before us[,] would one day be written."
And that's exactly what happened. A young Ralph Ellison read everything in the segregated branch of the Oklahoma City library; Malcolm X was profoundly affected by Paradise Lost; and Toni Morrison minored in classics at Howard University.
Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation…
Books—broadly defined as any kind of written or printed document—are the primary means by which civilizations are constructed, memories are preserved, ideas are communicated, wealth is distributed, and power is exercised. To understand any human society, you must read its books. And as Winston Churchill said, “Books last forever.” The physical structures of civilizations eventually crumble into ruins, but the books they leave behind are immortal.
Middlebrow was the deadliest insult Virginia Woolf and Dwight Macdonald could hurl at a book.
Until recently, that vast literary territory was ignored by scholars. Joan Rubin changed all that with a study that really deserves the overused label "groundbreaking." Middlebrow books, which dominated American culture between 1920 and 1960, strove to make challenging subjects accessible to a somewhat educated audience.
A legendary example was Will and Ariel Durant's 11-volume The Story of Civilization. Before literary criticism became a hermetic business of professors talking only to one another, every newspaper had a weekend book review section, where public critics like Irita Van Doren and Clifton Fadiman addressed general readers.
The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy;…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
As an avid reader, I'm curious about where books come from and what they do. How does a story get to be a book? How does someone become an author? What is happening to us as we read? I worked in publishing, and eventually, I started teaching other people how to become editors and publishers. As a faculty member, I had time to study and write about book history. I joined the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing when it was formed and became its president. The conferences helped me to learn about the history of books throughout the world and from pre-print times to the present.
As a writer and teacher, I’ve always classified plagiarism as a high crime and misdemeanor. It’s the academic equivalent of treason. Thomas Mallon covers well-known and unknown instances, word thieves punished and not. The book is highly entertaining but deadly serious about the harm done by plagiarists and by those who do not take their crimes seriously.
"The definitive book on the subject" of plagiarism (The New York Times) is updated with a new afterword about the Internet.
What is plagiarism, and why is it such a big deal? Since when is originality considered an indispensable attribute of authorship? Stolen Words is a deft and well-informed history of the sin every writer fears from every angle. Award-winning author Thomas Mallon begins in the seventeenth century and pushes forward toward scandals in publishing, academia, and Hollywood, exploring the motivations, consequences, and emotional reverberations of an intriguing and distressingly widespread practice. In this now-classic study, Mallon proves himself to…
I’ve been fascinated by the fantastic since childhood—ever since I read my first book, The Princess & the Goblin. As a young adult, I lived on the Emerald Isle of Ireland and I fell in love with the history and legends of the British Isles. Stories of King Arthur, Saint Patrick, and the mighty warrior Cu Chulainn inspired my imagination. Now through years of studying Arthurian Legend and Celtic Mythos—I write historical fantasy filled with the ageless inspirations of the ancient Celtic world.
Read this book if you want to get inside the heads of the two fathers of Fantasy, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. This book brilliantly ventures into what created the ‘Inklings’, and how they inspired each other to write fantastic stories of hobbits, dragons and magical worlds. This book particularly gripped me, because these two authors are my hero’s and have inspired my imagination above all others. This book even showed me how I could personally become an inkling, and join forces with other creative, and inspired writers to create a new world all our own.
An inside look at the Inklings and their creative process
C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings met each week to read and discuss each other's works-in-progress, offering both encouragement and blistering critique. How did these conversations shape the books they were writing? How does creative collaboration enhance individual talent? And what can we learn from their example?
Complemented with original illustrations by James Owen, Bandersnatch offers an inside look at the Inklings of Oxford-and a seat at their table at the Eagle and Child pub. It shows how encouragement and criticism made all the difference…
Some years ago, I believed that after I had read the “famous” 19th-century novelists Jane Austen at the beginning of the century, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens more or less in the middle, and Henry James, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton at the end, I had “done” the century and was disappointed that there was no more of worth to entertain me. Wrong, of course. Maria Edgeworth (Anglo-Irish) was a revelation; Catherine Maria Sedgewick (American) opened my eyes to New England; Margaret Oliphant (Scottish) combined the “weird,” spiritual, and a ruthless realism about family dysfunction. So I'm still reading. The 19th-century novels of Great Britain and America are an avocation and a passion.
There is something magical about this book. It’s a brilliant piece of research and a touching evocation of a particular summer when, among other things, the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were secretly planning their elopement, Tennyson was planning a walking tour in Switzerland that included a visit to Charles Dickens, P. T. Barnum was touring with “General Tom Thumb,” and the artist Benjamin Haydon was approaching suicide. I was bowled over by the richness of lives lived packed into just two hundred pages.
Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting).
Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo .
'Never bettered.' Guardian 'Brilliant.' Julian Barnes 'Wholly original.' Craig Brown 'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes 'Extraordinary.' Penelope Lively
June 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I've been obsessed with the material aspects of places - and the infrastructures that make them work - since I was a really young boy! (I remember, aged around 7, sitting on a bridge over the M6 motorway near Preston watching the traffic). This obsession was channeled into studying Geography, becoming a qualified urban planner, and completing a Ph.D. on how digital technologies effect urban life. A preoccupation with the subterranean realms of cities is also long-standing; it drove the 'Below' parts of my 2016 book Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers. (I must admit I suffer from both claustropobia and vertigo! So, sadly, a lot of my work is necessarily desk-based!)
The subterranean worlds of cities have long been represented as a literal ‘underworld’ – a hidden and shadowy realm inhabited by all sorts of marginalised and spectral figures and communities.
Very often, such communities – real, imagined, and mythical – have been deemed by elites to be morally, socially, and biologically threatening the above-surface city. As someone who does not generally read a huge amount of fiction, Heise’s wonderful book was a huge inspiration for me.
It explores and reveals like no other book how American urban underworlds have been represented across a range of American literature.
From New York through Chicago and Los Angeles, what emerges is a rich a vibrant history through which the lived and imagined world below cities have been pivotal in key novels.
Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as ""urban underworlds"" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin.
The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ…
Some years ago, I believed that after I had read the “famous” 19th-century novelists Jane Austen at the beginning of the century, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens more or less in the middle, and Henry James, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton at the end, I had “done” the century and was disappointed that there was no more of worth to entertain me. Wrong, of course. Maria Edgeworth (Anglo-Irish) was a revelation; Catherine Maria Sedgewick (American) opened my eyes to New England; Margaret Oliphant (Scottish) combined the “weird,” spiritual, and a ruthless realism about family dysfunction. So I'm still reading. The 19th-century novels of Great Britain and America are an avocation and a passion.
Curious about the century that produced works as varied as Pride and Prejudice,Jane Eyre, and Bleak House? This is the book for you! Because it is organized by topics—money and social precedence to begin and the workhouse and death to end—it is easy to dip in and out of. It has added greatly to my understanding of 19th-century fiction. The invaluable glossary at the end lists terms that are strange to us in the 21st century and gives clear brief definitions. Now I know that loowas not an English euphemism for a toilet and that aha-hawas not a joke!
A "delightful reader's companion" (The New York Times) to the great nineteenth-century British novels of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontes, and more, this lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules and customs that governed life in Victorian England.
For anyone who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell "Tally Ho!" at a fox hunt, or how one landed in "debtor's prison," this book serves as an indispensable historical and literary resource. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the "plums" in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the…
Growing up in Philadelphia, with school and family visits to landmarks like Independence Hall and Betsy Ross’s house, I’ve long been interested in American history. That led me, eventually, to graduate school and my profession as a historian. At the same time, I have greatly enjoyed reading American novelists, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin, as well as the works of thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. DuBois. The sweet spot combining those two interests has been American intellectual history.
This book showed me how engaging, intellectual history can be written. It’s never enough to present information. If you respect your readers, as Delbanco does, keep them entertained. These twelve essays mix the personal, literary, and social in a lively and often surprising, frothy brew. I also like the way Delbanco makes the distant past relevant for today’s world.
Individual sentences are a delight. You’ll leave the book knowing much more about the life, times, and work of writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright.
From the author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of two rival secret agents — one Confederate, the other Union — sent to Britain during the Civil War.
The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was ordered to acquire a clandestine fleet intended to break Lincoln’s blockade, sink Northern…
I am a Professor of early-modern British History at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, who was a specialist in the Tudor period, especially the life and reign of Elizabeth I. However, while doing research over the past six years, I became excited by the politics, religion, and culture of the Jacobean period. James I’s reign had been a topic I taught in a week to undergraduates, but I realised that I didn’t do justice to this rich and important period. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, but James’s reign had a huge impact on a long stretch of British and world history.
I love this book because it combines history and literature, doing justice to both. By setting Lear and Macbeth in their cultural and political contexts, Professor Shapiro has given me new insights into both plays. Before seeing them again, I’ll go back to this book.
Shapiro is a model for me of an academic historian who successfully addresses a wider audience by avoiding academic jargon, explaining the unfamiliar, and telling a good story. He wears his great scholarship lightly, but he has done a huge amount of research and has a mastery of his subject.
Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America, shows how the tumultuous events in 1606 influenced three of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies written that year—King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. “The Year of Lear is irresistible—a banquet of wisdom” (The New York Times Book Review).
In the years leading up to 1606, Shakespeare’s great productivity had ebbed. But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn—King Lear—then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
