Browsings

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" (The Paris Review) and "the best book critic in America" (The New York Observer). His latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on a life in literature. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics are equally diverse: literary pets, the lost art of cursive writing, book inscriptions, the pleasures of science fiction conventions, author photographs, novelists in old age, Oberlin College, a year in Marseille, writer's block, and much more. As admirers of his earlier books will expect, there are annotated lists galore—of perfect book titles, great adventure novels, favorite words, books about books, and beloved children's classics, as well as a revealing peek at the titles Michael keeps on his own nightstand.Funny and erudite, Browsings is a celebration of the reading life, a fan's notes, and the perfect gift for any booklover.

About the Author :
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and longtime book columnist for The Washington Post. He was once chosen byWashingtonian Magazine as one of the twenty-five smartest people in our nation’s capital (but, as Michael says, you have to consider the competition). He also writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement;the New York Review of Books and other literary journals. His previous publications include the memoir An Open Book, four collections of essays—Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and Classics for Pleasure—and On Conan Doyle, for which he won an Edgar Award. A lifelong Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle fan, he was inducted into The Baker Street Irregulars in 2002. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Review :
A brief, elegant reflection. For so many years Dirda has been such an insightful guide to literatures past and present. --Nick Owchar" Charming. " Dirda has written a rollicking, erudite, and terrifically beguiling little book. Reading experiences don't get much more captivating than this; nor does literary criticism. --Maureen Corrigan" If we were all to write about reading as Dirda does, if we taught children to write from joy rather than to form arguments, then the world would have many more serious readers and far better books. " Imagine having a really unbelievably well-read friend, who likes the same stuff that you do but is able to articulate why he loves it so much better than you can. And while explaining it points you at a hundred books and authors you'd love but haven't heard of or have never got around to reading. And who makes you feel, by the end of his explanation, as if you've been inaugurated into a secret society of people who love what can be done with words. That's who Michael Dirda is, and that's what this book does. --Neil Gaiman" In remembering and reflecting upon his own first excitements as a reader, Dirda is infectious. --Larry McMurtry"