From the esteemed cultural critic and journalist Wendy Lesser, Nothing Remains the Same is a bibliophile's dream: a book about the pleasures and surprises of rereading, a witty, intelligent exploration of what books can mean to our lives. Compared with reading, the act of rereading is far more personal -- it involves the interaction of our past selves, our present selves, and literature. With candor, humor, and grace, Lesser takes us on a guided tour of her own return to books she once knew, from the plays of Shakespeare to twentieth-century novels by Kingsley Amis and Ian McEwan, from the childhood favorite I Capture the Castle to classic novels such as Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, from nonfiction by Henry Adams to poetry by Wordsworth. Lesser conveys an infectious love of reading and inspires us all to take another look at the books we've read to find the unexpected treasures they might offer.
WENDY LESSER, the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of one novel and more than a dozen books of nonfiction. She has written about dance, music, film, television, and literature for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, and numerous other publications, both in the US and abroad. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin, she presently divides her time between Berkeley, New York, and Berlin.