The Great Age of Storytelling

“A rambunctious personality wanders the aisles of rare-book stores; musing about language, aging and traffic; and catching up with fellow aficionados of the weird and the obscure. The innumerable forgotten books he catalogs are captivating.”
* The New York Times *
“Pleasure, provocation, passion ? just some of the words that came to my mind and through my heart as I perused this book. A reunion with the old forgotten favorite books and an introduction to some dazzling new ones, this is a book to go to bed with, to wake up to, and to browse through in between.” * Azar Nafisi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Republic of Imagination *
“In remembering and reflecting upon his own first excitements as a reader, Dirda is infectious.” * Larry McMurtry, Harper’s Magazine *
“It’s awfully refreshing, in this Age of Noise, to know that there are still critics like Michael Dirda reading the pages of books old and new. His essays have a sort of plain-spoken elegance about them, one that relies more on a generosity of feeling than on an excess of intellect. Dirda shows that he’s one of the most accessible critics still doing the good work.”
* Minneapolis Star Tribune *
“Smart but not stuffy, critical but not carping, self-engaged but not self-absorbed. Dirda’s intellect is a brightly populated curio cabinet.” * The Wall Street Journal *
“Michael Dirda, bookman extraordinaire, has elevated the indulgent pleasures of browsing to the quality of high art. A marvelous collection for serious book lovers, common readers and all of us who take a guilty delight in the gossip of literature.” * Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading *
“Elegantly written musings about calligraphy, writer’s block, genre conferences, the books on a given critic’s nightstand, with the odd personal reminiscence thrown in.”
* The Los Angeles Review of Books *

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and longtime book columnist for The Washington Post. He was once chosen by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the twenty-five smartest people in our nation’s capital (but, as Michael says, you have to consider the competition). He also writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and other literary journals.

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