How to Read and Why

Book details

Details for How to Read and Why
AuthorBloom, Harold
PublisherScribner
Bindingpaperback
PublishedOctober 2, 2001
EditionTouchtone ed.
LanguageEnglish
Pages288
ISBN-100684859076
ISBN-139780684859071
Weight0.6 lb
Dimensions
H × W × L
0.94 in × 5.51 in × 8.35 in

How to Read and Why

$6.24 $17.58
Availability:
In stock
SKU:
0684859076-3
Condition
Condition notes

Used book in very good condition. Pages and cover are intact, with minor wear. Limited notes or highlighting are possible. CDs and access codes may be missing.

About this book

America's wisest, most prolific reader—and the New York Times best-selling author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human —draws on his more than 40 years as a college professor and critic to help readers attain a truly profound engagement with great literature. Publishers Weekly This aesthetic self-help manual is a reliably idiosyncratic guide to what Yale literary critic Bloom calls "the most healing of pleasures"-- reading well. In chapters that focus on short stories, poems, novels and plays, Bloom takes...

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America's wisest, most prolific reader—and the New York Times best-selling author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human —draws on his more than 40 years as a college professor and critic to help readers attain a truly profound engagement with great literature.

Publishers Weekly

This aesthetic self-help manual is a reliably idiosyncratic guide to what Yale literary critic Bloom calls "the most healing of pleasures"-- reading well. In chapters that focus on short stories, poems, novels and plays, Bloom takes readers on a swift but satisfying joyride through the West's most outrageous, original and exuberant texts--classics by Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Borges, Dickinson, Proust, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, among others. Unconventionally organized by literary genre, his text is passionately anecdotal and observant. By asking great questions--"Why does Lady Bracknell delight us so much?"; "How does one read a short story?"--Bloom hopes to influence our reading lists and habits. He gives some texts, such as Moby-Dick, almost cursory treatment; others he discusses at length. Fans of his bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) will find the lengthy discussion of Hamlet here to be a kind of coda. Overall, this book is a testament to Bloom's view that reading is above all a pleasurably therapeutic event. "Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness," he notes, reminding us of what's inexhaustible about writers such as Whitman and Borges and attesting to the satisfaction that literary texts offer our solitary selves. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|


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