Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader - Paperback

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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
  • Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader - Paperback

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader - Paperback

by Anne Fadiman
$17.00
$17.00

Book Overview

Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice.

This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony--Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners.
ISBN9780374527228
Author Anne Fadiman
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedNovember 2000
LanguageENG- English
Pages176
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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Literary Collections Nonfiction

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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader - Paperback

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader - Paperback

By Anne Fadiman

About Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman was born in New York City and was raised in Connecticut and Los Angeles. After graduating from Harvard, she worked as a wilderness instructor in Wyoming before returning to New York to write. She has been a staff writer at Life, editor-at-large of Civilization, and editor of The American Scholar. Fadiman is also the author of Ex Libris and At Large and At Small, and the editor of Rereadings. She now lives with her family in western Massachusetts and serves as the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.

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