Lost Classics
Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Ex tinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An Anchor Books Original
Seventy-four distinguished writers tell personal tales of books loved and lost–great books overlooked, under-read, out of print, stolen, scorned, extinct, or otherwise out of commission.
Compiled by the editors of Brick: A Literary Magazine, Lost Classics is a reader’s delight: an intriguing and entertaining collection of eulogies for lost books. As the editors have written in a joint introduction to the book, “being lovers of books, we’ve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory.” Anyone who has ever been changed by a book will find kindred spirits in the pages of Lost Classics.
Each of the editors has contributed a lost book essay to this collection, including Michael Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara’s Bringing Tony Home, a novella about a mutual era of childhood. Also included are Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905; Russell Banks on the off-beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene–the “slightly ditzy” cousin of Graham; Bill Richardson on a children’s book for adults by Russell Hoban; Ronald Wright on William Golding’s Pincher Martin; Caryl Phillips on Michael Mac Liammoir’s account of his experiences on the set of Orson Welles’s Othello, and much, much more.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission, assembled by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding (editors of the Canadian literary magazine Brick), 74 writers honor books that hang in the world by a thread, if at all. Contributors include the editors; Margaret Atwood on Hjalmar S derberg's Doctor Glas, which caused a scandal in Sweden in 1905; Anne Carson on Dhuoda's Handbook for William, dating to the 840s, wherein an exiled wife imparts "actics of survival... in this world and the next" to her hostage son (whom she never saw again); and Robert Creeley on David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible, "an extraordinary record of... the last of the fifties." ( Aug. 28)