Jonathan Rose— Hanoverian Britain had its counterpart of the Bibliothèque bleue—chapbooks offering romances, fairy tales, and other fantastic stories. And a few of their readers, in memoirs, helpfully explained how they read them. As a boy, the poet John Clare (b. 1793) consumed 6d. (sixpence) romances of Cinderella and Jack and
Harold Bloom— In what sense does deep reading augment life? Can it render death only another hoyden? Most literary representations of death do not portray her as being particularly boisterous. Why “her”? Is it the long cavalcade associating death and the mother? I have learned from Epicurus and Lucretius what
Francis Spufford— Here comes the winter night. If we were our oldest ancestors, tucked into draughty recesses of caves with blue hands hugged around us as we slept, we’d be dreaming of summer: we’d be using our human freedom to step away from circumstances to wish that all mornings were
Beth Barton Schweiger— The power of literacy’s hold on the modern imagination cannot easily be measured. One way to begin to comprehend it is to pose a question: who is against it? From local school boards to Capitol Hill to the United Nations General Assembly, the consensus that literacy empowers
Azar Nafisi— Reading is like Alice running after that white rabbit, because she is curious; she wants to know more about a talking rabbit. She is prepared to take the risk and jump down that hole without knowing what she will find at the bottom of the well. This is
Abigail Williams— On April 15th, 1802, Dorothy and William Wordsworth took one of the most significant walks in literary history. They set out in blustery weather, across the fells near Ullswater in the Lake District. It was misty and mild, with a strong wind, and the first signs of spring were
What drives us to learn? How do books help us understand the world? How does language fail us? We sat down with reader and writer Alberto Manguel to satisfy our, well, curiosity. Yale University Press: How much do your personal experiences affect what you write about? Alberto Manguel: I’m not a scholar,
Happy National Readathon Day! The National Book Foundation has organized the holiday to promote a love of reading and to make sure that the book worm doesn’t become an endangered species. You can find out how to support the foundation’s efforts here, but the most important thing is to set aside
August 9th is Book Lovers Day! It’s a time to curl up with a book or three and read your heart out, and Yale University Press is here to help you celebrate. We know that choosing what to read next can be both sweetly intoxicating and totally overwhelming, so we’ve
As we are soon to publish A Little History of Philosophy, a lively and accessible introduction to Western philosophy and its thinkers, author Nigel Warburton reflects on his first encounter with the works of the eminent art historian, Ernst Gombrich, who wrote the bestselling A Little History of the World,