Books Promiscuously Read

Reading as a Way of Life

Books Promiscuously Read
Heather Cass White
RRP:
NZ$ 49.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 39.99
Hardback
h208 x 135mm - 176pg
14 Sep 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780374115265
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
Heather Cass White' s Books Promiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preeminence of literature as an aesthetic form, Books Promiscuously Readillustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading provides for those inclined to do it. Through three sections-Play, Transgression, and Insight-which focus on three ways of thinking about reading, Books Promiscuously Read moves among and considers many poems, novels, stories, and works of nonfiction. The prose is shot through with quotations reflecting the way readers think through the words of others. Books Promiscuously Read is a tribute to the whole lives readers live in their books, and aims to recommit people to those lives. As White writes, "What matters is staying attuned to an ordinary, unflashy, mutely persistent miracle; that all the books to be read, and all the selves to be because we have read them, are still there, still waiting, still undiminished in their power. It is an astonishing joy. "
"An elegantly constructed meditation on the vital relation between reading and the everyday self, Books Promiscuously Read animates the experience with wit, brilliance, and affection. A pleasure to read and pass on. " --Vivian Gornick, author of Unfinished Business' People who like to read should do more of it, ' writes Heather Cass White. People who like to read should read more of Heather Cass White. Buoyant, precise, speculative, astute, intermittently wild, this book is proved on the pulse. Somewhere between commonplace book and brilliant guide for the perplexed, between apologia and essai, White' s work shimmers: aphoristic, inviting, provocative. Proposing reading "as a mode of living" and "a species of dreaming," White salutes the perfectly useless jouissance of readerly absorption; en route she offers fleet, searching, illuminating readings (of Cervantes, George Eliot, Thylias Moss, inter alia). This is seriously deep play. --Maureen N. McLane, author of More AnonDiscerning . . . Literary-minded readers will appreciate this fresh approach. --Publishers Weekly
Heather Cass White has edited three collections of Marianne Moore' s work: New Collected Poems; A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936; and Adversity & Grace: Marianne Moore, 1936-1941. She is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780374115265
Published: 14 Sep 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Farrar Straus Giroux
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Format: Hardback
Height: 208mm
Width: 135mm
Weight: 300g
Pages: 176

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