Stories of Books and Libraries

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics anthology of stories that testify to the irresistible power of the written word

The characters in the delightful stories collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco s The Name of the Rose to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith s Public Library and Other Stories. In these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore s Community Life and Elizabeth McCracken's "Juliet" and are ushered into a host of unusual libraries, including the infinite rooms of Jorge Luis Borges s The Library of Babel and a secret library in Helen Oyeyemi s Books and Roses.

Books exert their power in mysterious ways: an attempt by the military leaders of an imaginary nation to censor all of literature goes awry in Italo Calvino s A General in the Library and Julio Cortázar s mesmerizing The Continuity of Parks dramatizes the merging of t he world inside and outside of a book. In Stories of Books and Libraries, a dazzling array of writers including Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Walter Benjamin, Isaac Babel, Teffi, and Ray Bradbury pay tribute to books and the magical places that house them.


Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

CONTENTS

Ray Bradbury, Exchange
Helen Oyeyemi, Books And Roses"
Richard de Bury, from The Philobiblon
Umberto Eco, from The Name of the Rose
John Bale, from The Laborious Journey
Italo Calvino, A General in the Library
Lorrie Moore, Community Life
Mary Arnold, A Morning in the Bodleian
Elizabeth Taylor, Girl Reading
Evelyn Waugh, The Man Who Liked Dickens
Julio Cortazar, A Continuity of Parks
Ali Smith, The Ex-Wife
Isaac Babel, The Public Library
Elizabeth McCracken, Juliet
Max Beerbohm, Enoch Soames
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
Michel de Montaigne, from "Of Three Kinds of Association"
Samuel Pepys, from The Diary
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "On the Reading of Novels"
Alan Bennett, from The Uncommon Reader
Maxim Gorky, The Icon-Painters
Charles Lamb, Two Essays of Elia
Colette, My Mother and the Books
Saki, Forewarned
Italo Calvino, fro m If On A Winter s Night A Traveler
Teffi, My First Tolstoy
Fay Weldon, Lily Bart s Hat Shop
Jasper Fforde, Wuthering Heights
Helene Hanff, from 84 Charing Cross Road
Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library
Ernest Rhys, from Everyman Remembers
John Evelyn, from Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library
Seneca, from De Tranqvillitate Animi
J. W. Von Goethe, from Conversations with Goethe
Azar Nafisi, from Reading Lolita In Tehran
Ray Bradbury, The Library