Homer

Michael Dirda

Samuel Butler

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

California

Two of the greatest adventure stories of all time, these timeless epics of war, duty, honour and revenge are filled with magic, mystery and an assortment of gods and goddesses who meddle freely in the affairs of men. The Iliad recounts the war between the Trojans and Achaeans and the personal and tragic struggle of the fiery-tempered Achilles. The Odyssey chronicles Odysseus's return from the Trojan War and the trials he endures on his journey home.

Iliad and the Odyssey (PB105)

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Iliad and the Odyssey

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New Hampshire

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.

Browsings

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An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education

Among the most enjoyable of literary critics, Michael Dirda combines erudition with enthusiasm, a taste for the outré and the forgotten, and a playful, understated wit. Like George Orwell or Gore Vidal, Dirda delights in popular genres, such as the detective novel and the ghost story, without neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes-overlooked classics. This new work features scores of Dirda's most engaging essays, never previously collected in book form, all intended to introduce readers to wonderful writers, from the anecdotal Herodotus and James Boswell to the sensuous Colette and Steven Millhauser to such European masters as Joseph Roth, Flann O'Brien, and Penelope Fitzgerald. With his trademark enthusiasm, Dirda also explores The Arabian Nights, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, the crime novels of Chester Himes and K. C. Constantine, and the worlds of Tarzan, Cormac McCarthy, and Proust. Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

Bound to Please

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Essays and Literary Entertainments

Intimate, humorous, and insightful, Readings is a collection of classic essays and reviews by Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. From a first reading of Beckett and Faulkner at the feet of an inspirational high-school English teacher to a meeting of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, from an obsession with Nabokov's Lolita to the discovery of the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, these essays chronicle a lifetime of literary enjoyment.

Readings

Notes on Reading and Life

"As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again."
--Chicago Tribune (Editor's Choice)

While books contain insights into our selves and the world, it takes a conversation--between the author and the reader, or between two readers--to bring them fully to life. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word informs and enriches nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.

Organized by significant life events and abounding with quotations from great writers and thinkers, Book by Book showcases Dirda's capacious love for and understanding of books. Favoring showing as much as telling, Dirda draws us deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an eye to how we might better understand our lives.

Book by Book

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Ohio

This is not your father’s list of classics. In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world’s most entertaining books. Writing with affection as well as authority, Dirda covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay, and children’s literature. Organized thematically, these are works that have shaped our imaginations. Love’s Mysteries moves from Sappho and Arthurian romance to Soren Kierkegaard and Georgette Heyer. In other categories Dirda discusses not only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes but also the Tao Te Ching and Icelandic sagas, Frederick Douglass and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Whether writing about Petronius or Perelman, Dirda makes literature come alive. Classics for Pleasure is a perfect companion for any reading group or lover of books.

Classics for Pleasure

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Richard Peabody

#paperback #smallpress #collectedworks #indiepress #fiction #poetry #essay 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Maryland

Filling an important gap in the literary world, The Richard Peabody Reader is a wide-ranging selection of this great writer's poetry and prose. As a publisher, Peabody's steadfast dedication to that which is new, challenging, innovative, and dynamic has won him a wide reputation among writers whose work he has championed. This volume demonstrates those same values, embodied in nearly four decades of fiercely smart, sophisticated, and often very funny writing. From his first collection of poems, I'm in Love with the Morton Salt Girl , to his most recent collection of short stories, Blue Suburban Skies , Peabody has established and developed a thoroughly unique voice, both warm and piercing, to deliver content that ranges from the hilarious, as in the short story "Flea Wars," to the bittersweet, as in the poem "The Other Man is Always French," to the elegiac, as in the poem in "Civil War Pieta," to the absurd, as in the rollicking farce of the short story, "Bad Day at Ikea." Peabody's aesthetic is all-embracing--strands of punk, beat, experimental, feminist, and political protest literary influences blend with the purely romantic to create a body of work that is both profound and pleasing. This series is devoted to career-spanning collections from writers who meet the following three criteria: The majority of their books have been published by independent presses; they are active in more than one literary genre; and they are consistent and influential champions of the work of other writers, whether through publishing, reviewing, teaching, mentoring, or some combination of these. Modeled after the "readers" popular in academia in the mid-20th centuries, our Legacy Series allows readers to trace the arc of a significant writer's literary development in a single, representative volume.

The Richard Peabody Reader

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New York

Surveying the dizzying universe of classic books, Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning literary essayist, proves himself to be one of the most engaging critics of our time--and great fun to read. Opening with an impassioned critique of modern reading habits, he then presents many of the great, and idiosyncratic, writers he loves most. In this showcase of one hundred of the world's most astonishing books, Dirda covers a remarkable range of literature, including popular genres such as the detective novel and ghost story, while never neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes overlooked classics. Short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for criticism, Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

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George MacDonald Fraser

Introduction by Michael Dirda

Three of George MacDonald Fraser’s incomparable and hilarious novels featuring the lovable rogue, soldier, cheat, and coward: Harry Paget Flashman.

Praised by everyone from John Updike to Jane Smiley, Fraser was an acknowledged master of comedy and satire, an unrivaled storyteller, whose craft was matched only by his impeccable historical research. And his greatest creation was, of course, Flashman. The novels collected here find our hero in the midst of his usual swashbuckling adventures of derring-do: fleeing adversaries in the First Anglo-Afghan War; meeting and nearly deceiving a young Abraham Lincoln in America; alternately impersonating a native Indian cavalry recruit and wooing women in India; and managing, whatever the circumstances, to keep his hero’s reputation unsullied.

A must-have treat for the legions of dedicated Flashman fans, and a delightful introduction for those lucky enough to be encountering him for the first time.

Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game

This is not your father's list of classics. In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world's most entertaining books.  Writing with affection as well as authority, Dirda covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay, and children's literature. Organized thematically, these are works that have shaped our imaginations. "Love's Mysteries" moves from Sappho and Arthurian romance to Sören Kierkegaard and Georgette Heyer. In other categories Dirda discusses not only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes but also the Tao Te Ching and Icelandic sagas, Frederick Douglass and Fowler's Modern English Usage. Whether writing about Petronius or Perelman, Dirda makes literature come alive. Classics for Pleasure is a perfect companion for any reading group or lover of books.

Peter Constantine

Isaac Babel

Detached, violent, stunning. Babel was a huge influence on Michael Moorcock. X16

Arizona

Konarmiya

Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks, peasants, and shtetl-dwellers; and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to figure out his role in the new Russia.".

Red Cavalry

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Mary Augusta Thomas

Storrs L. Olson

Adventures in the Smithsonian Libraries

This elegantly illustrated accompaniment to a new Smithsonian Libraries exhibition provides a three-part expedition through the collection. The book includes essays by Michael Dirda and Storrs Olson and accompanies the exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

An Odyssey in Print

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 Some wear on the very edges of the cover; otherwise in great shape.

Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling

From Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda, a delightful introduction to the creator of Sherlock Holmes A passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars—the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider’s account of the curiously delightful activities and playful scholarship of The Baker Street Irregulars. On Conan Doyle is a much-needed celebration of Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius for every kind of storytelling.

On Conan Doyle

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Coming of Age in the Heartland

This funny, wistful memoir by a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic recalls the charm of growing up and the tenderness of one writer's beginnings.

Browse by categories

Homer

Iliad and the Odyssey

Michael Dirda

Browsings

Michael Dirda

Bound to Please

Michael Dirda

Readings

Michael Dirda

Book by Book

Michael Dirda

Classics for Pleasure

Richard Peabody

The Richard Peabody Reader

Michael Dirda

Bound to Please

George MacDonald Fraser

Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game

Michael Dirda

Classics for Pleasure

Peter Constantine

Red Cavalry

Mary Augusta Thomas

An Odyssey in Print

Michael Dirda

On Conan Doyle

Michael Dirda

Open Book