Bound to Please - Hardcover

Dirda, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393057577 ISBN 13: 9780393057577

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

Synopsis

A showcase of one hundred of the world's most astonishing books, Bound to Please is 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Dirda, who won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism at the Washington Post Book World, is the author of An Open Book, Bound to Please, and Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. In the opening of this marvelous collection of book reviews, Dirda declares that his book "intentionally resembles a cocktail party more than a work of criticism: it’s meant to be entertaining, sometimes provocative, above all a way to catch up with old friends and make new ones." The author himself serves as the perfect host: intelligent but humble, witty but substantial, instructive but never dogmatic. Dirda, who has worked as a writer and editor at the Washington Post Book World for more than 20 years, and who won a Pulitzer for his criticism in 1993, arranges his volume by topic so that readers interested in, say, the Renaissance, can turn to the section on "Old Masters" and find essays on both Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose and Peter Brown’s history The Rise of Western Christendom. Dirda is particularly deft at presenting well-known classics in a way that makes them seem fresh and inviting. Of Rabelais’s characters he writes, for example: "You wouldn’t want them for neighbors, but they’d be great on your side in a fight." And he’s tops at conveying the pleasure of reading itself. In fact, if there’s one problem with his collection, it’s that its essays are so tantalizing that they make you want to put down his book and run out to read a whole slew of new ones. But this, it’s clear, is exactly what Dirda wants. He’s included only the most praiseworthy reviews in this volume, with the hope that they will encourage readers "to look beyond the boundaries of the fashionable, established, or academic" and to become familiar with "terrific writers from around the world," such as Fernando Pessoa, Marcel Proust and Mikhail Bulgakov. Any serious reader will appreciate these gracious recommendations from one of the best literary journalists of our time.
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0393057577
• ISBN 13: 9780393057577
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560