This is not your father’s list of classics. In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world’s most entertaining books. Writing with affection as well as authority, Dirda covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay, and children’s literature. Organized thematically, these are works that have shaped our imaginations. Love’s Mysteries moves from Sappho and Arthurian romance to Soren Kierkegaard and Georgette Heyer. In other categories Dirda discusses not only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes but also the Tao Te Ching and Icelandic sagas, Frederick Douglass and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Whether writing about Petronius or Perelman, Dirda makes literature come alive. Classics for Pleasure is a perfect companion for any reading group or lover of books.

Classics for Pleasure

Literature & Fiction

Dirda, Michael

History & Criticism

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

This is not your father’s list of classics. In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world’s most entertaining books. Writing with affection as well as authority, Dirda covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay, and children’s literature. Organized thematically, these are works that have shaped our imaginations. "Love’s Mysteries" moves from Sappho and Arthurian romance to Sören Kierkegaard and Georgette Heyer. In other categories Dirda discusses not only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes but also the Tao Te Ching and Icelandic sagas, Frederick Douglass and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Whether writing about Petronius or Perelman, Dirda makes literature come alive. Classics for Pleasure is a perfect companion for any reading group or lover of books.

Classics For Pleasure (Harvest Book)

Reference

Harper-perennial

Readings Literary Entertainments Michael Dirda 
The best of the column, "Readings," fromWashington Post Book World, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda.
Since 1993Washington Post Book World has published a monthly column by Michael Dirda called "Readings." Personal, erudite, serious, and sometimes playful, these columns cover a variety of subjects: classics in translation, intellectual history, children’s books, fantasy and crime fiction, American and European literature, poetry, innovative writing, the joys of collecting first editions, rediscovering neglected novels, ghost stories, teaching writing, and the challenges of parenthood and life in general. Dirda is a writer’s reader and a reader’s writer. He is an impeccable guide to good reading from the light—he loves P. G. Wodehouse—to scholarly esoterica. His columns are always worth a pause, always worth reading, always worth coming back to. Readings presents his most memorable essays, including "The Crime of His Life" (a youthful caper), "Bookman’s Saturday" (the scheming of a book collector), "Weekend with Wodehouse," "Mr. Wright" (an exemplary high school teacher), "Listening to My Father," "Turning Fifty," and "Millennial Readings." This is a book to keep on your bedside for ending the day with pleasurable reading. Michael Dirda is a writer and senior editor forWashington Post Book World. For three years he was a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. In 1993 Dirda received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.
[Use one of these excerpts from book]
"Pleasures of a book reviewer: To open a new book tentatively, with indifference even, and to find oneself yet again in thrall—to a writer’s prose, to a thriller’s plot, to a thinker’s mind. Let the whole wide world crumble, so long as I can read another page. And then another after that. And then a hundred more."
"Book collecting is often a form of hero worship—or heroine worship (no one bows lower than I before the genius of Angela Carter, Colette and Agatha Christie, to mention only three high Cs). After a while, though, one yearns for more than first editions and scholarly sets of an author’s complete works. Enthusiasm spreads, insidiously, into what one may call supplementary areas."

Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Indiana University Press

The memoirs of a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary journalist and critic discusses his childhood and education in small-town Ohio, his colorful family and friends, and his voracious appetite for reading. 50,000 first printing.

An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

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.

Bound to Please

W.W.Norton&Company

"For some time now, the best book critic in America has been Michael Dirda."―Michael M. Thomas, New York Observer Intimate, humorous, and insightful, Readings is a collection of classic essays and reviews by Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. From a first reading of Beckett and Faulkner at the feet of an inspirational high-school English teacher to a meeting of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, from an obsession with Nabokov's Lolita to the discovery of the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, these essays chronicle a lifetime of literary enjoyment.

Essays & Correspondence

"A love story, full of a passion for literature and marked by intellectual vigor."―Bernadette Murphy, Los Angeles Times "All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book," Michael Dirda's steelworker father used to complain, worried about his son's passion for reading. In An Open Book, one of the most delightful memoirs to emerge in years, the acclaimed literary journalist Michael Dirda re-creates his boyhood in rust-belt Ohio, first in the working-class town of Lorain, then at Oberlin College. In addition to his colorful family and friends, An Open Book also features the great writers and fictional characters who fueled Dirda's imagination: from Green Lantern to Sherlock Holmes, from Candy to Proust. The result is an affectionate homage to small-town America―summer jobs, school fights, sweepstakes contests, and first dates―as well as a paean to what could arguably be called the last great age of reading. "Dirda is a superb literary essayist."―Harold Bloom "Michael Dirda's memoir―no surprise to me―is so good that I went up to the attic meaning to send him one of my antique Big Little books as a salute to excellence...A great job. I'll be buying An Open Book for my children and grandchildren."―Russell Baker, author of Growing Up "Here, in An Open Book, is the show and tell of a wonderful American story, everything coming together in the immemorial dance of literature and memory, of history and gossip, and of the deeply felt, bittersweet story (his own) of a young life. Read it and rejoice."―George Garrett "A lovely, unapologetically nostalgic remembrance of growing up in a more innocent America, but it is also the touching story of one person's lifelong love affair with words."―June Sawyer, San Francisco Chronicle "Dirda inhabits each book he reads. Inhabits it―and makes a space alongside it for us to join him....He is a rare treasure."―James Sallis, Boston Sunday Globe

An Open Book: Chapters fom a Reader's Life

"Michael Dirda may be as close to the ideal critic as we are likely to get." -Annie Proulx Surveying the dizzying universe of classic books, Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning literary essayist, proves himself to be one of the most engaging critics of our time-and great fun to read. Opening with an impassioned critique of modern reading habits, he then presents many of the great, and idiosyncratic, writers he loves most. In this showcase of one hundred of the world's most astonishing books, Dirda covers a remarkable range of literature, including popular genres such as the detective novel and ghost story, while never neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes overlooked classics. Short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for criticism, Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education

United States

A passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars―the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider’s account of the curiously delightful activities and playful scholarship of The Baker Street Irregulars.
On Conan Doyle is a much-needed celebration of Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius for every kind of storytelling.

On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling (Writers on Writers)

Genre Fiction

Princeton University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dirda, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dirda, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dirda, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Classics for Pleasure

Classics For Pleasure (Harvest Book)

Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland

Bound to Please

Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

An Open Book: Chapters fom a Reader's Life

Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education

On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling (Writers on Writers)

On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling (Writers on Writers)