There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe. What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else? In B-Side Books, leading writers, critics, and scholars show why their favorite forgotten books deserve a new audience. From dusty westerns and far-out science fiction to obscure Czech novelists and romance-novel precursors, the contributors advocate for the unsung virtues of overlooked books. They write about unheralded novels, poetry collections, memoirs, and more with understanding, respect, passion, and love. In these thoughtful, often personal essays, contributors-including Stephanie Burt, Caleb Crain, Merve Emre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carlo Rotella, and Namwali Serpell-read books by writers such as Helen DeWitt, Shirley Jackson, Stanislaw Lem, Dambudzo Marechera, Paule Marshall, and Charles Portis.

When you are half lost in a work of art, what happens to the half left behind? Semi-Detached delves into this state of being: what it means to be within and without our social and physical milieu, at once interacting and drifting away, and how it affects our ideas about aesthetics. The allure of many modern aesthetic experiences, this book argues, is that artworks trigger and provide ways to make sense of this oscillating, in-between place. John Plotz focuses on Victorian and early modernist writers and artists who understood their work as tapping into, amplifying, or giving shape to a suspended duality of experience. The book begins with the decline of the romantic tale, the rise of realism, and John Stuart Mill's ideas about social interaction and subjective perception. Plotz examines Pre-Raphaelite paintings that take semi-detached states of attention as their subject and novels that treat provincial subjects as simultaneously peripheral and central. He discusses how realist writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James show how consciousness can be in more than one place at a time; how the work of William Morris demonstrates the shifting forms of semi-detachment in print and visual media; and how Willa Cather created a form of modernism that connected aesthetic dreaming and reality. Plotz concludes with a look at early cinema and the works of Buster Keaton, who found remarkable ways to portray semi-detachment on screen. In a time of cyberdependency and virtual worlds, when it seems that attention to everyday reality is stretching thin, Semi-Detached takes a historical and critical look at the halfway-thereness that audiences have long comprehended and embraced in their aesthetic encounters.

Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel's existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation. This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations-with a focus ranging from nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary literary theory-and explores the portability of novels as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices. While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks-ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, this volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new.

There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe. What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected or dismissed by everyone else? In B-Side Books, leading writers, critics, and scholars show why their favorite forgotten books deserve a new audience. From dusty westerns and far-out science fiction to obscure Czech novelists and romance-novel precursors, the contributors advocate for the unsung virtues of overlooked books. They write about unheralded novels, poetry collections, memoirs, and more with understanding, respect, passion, and love. In these thoughtful, often personal essays, contributors-including Stephanie Burt, Caleb Crain, Merve Emre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carlo Rotella, and Namwali Serpell-read books by writers such as Helen DeWitt, Shirley Jackson, Stanislaw Lem, Dambudzo Marechera, Paule Marshall, and Charles Portis.

A book on the experience of reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels. What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. She owned John Plotz at age eight, on the overlit and understaffed second floor of the DC library. Four decades and who knows how many re-readings later, her Earthsea owns him still. The reasons to love her Earthsea are many. Le Guin sets readers adrift among worlds: peripatetic but somehow at home. She sublimely mixes comfort and revelatory, emancipatory unsettlement. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea aims to do justice to both Le Guin's passionate simplicity and her revenant complexity. Small wonder the inspiration she has been for later speculative writers like Neil Gaiman, Kim Stanley Robinson, and N. K. Jemisin. The boldness and coldness of the later three books of Earthsea is a revelation. In Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind, she turned a cold eye, a dragon's searching eye, back on the comfortable green world she herself had made decades earlier. They unfold a distinctive vision of the writer's task: worldbuilding as responsibility plus openness. Call it invitational realism. She builds a world that leaves the real task of building, of creating of imagining and of reimagining, with her readers. Drawing on his own crooked path—from a DC childhood to teaching in Prague to San Francisco journalism to graduate school and then parenthood—Plotz maps the ways that readers young and old find in Earthsea a kind of scholar's stone, a delightfully mutable surface that rewards recurrent contemplation.

What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In "Portable Property," John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books.

"Portable Property" examines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda," Anthony Trollope's "Eustace Diamonds," and R. D. Blackmore's "Lorna Doone." He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.

"This book studies the historical emergence of a certain kind of politicized crowd with an originality and a brilliance that will make it the definitive work on the crowd in nineteenth-century literature."--John Kucich, author of "Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Charles Dickens and "The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction.

"This book will spark a great deal of debate, and debate of a far-reaching and desirable kind--perhaps even the sort of debate that has followed the similarly ambitious, paradigm-shifting work of people like D.A. Miller and Mary Poovey." --Bruce Robbins, author of "The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below and "Secular Vocation: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture.

"What a pleasure to read a skilled literary critic who has not only studied classic literary representations of crowds with sensitivity but also grounded them firmly in the actual political history that nurtured and received those representations! John Plotz has built a bridge where only slippery stepping stones existed."--Charles Tilly, author of "Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834

"John Plotz's important new book finds a fascinating point of entry into recent cultural histories of Britain. Plotz brings a keen literary eye to the aesthetics of the early nineteenth-century new mass presence, tracking the crowd through a variety of salient texts as it imprinted itself on the discursive environment of the metropolis. His adept exploration of the new field of collective meanings linking street, citizenry, and nation adds valuably to the growing literature on the public sphere."--Geoff Eley, author of "Remembering the Future

"John Plotz has revived one of the most important topics in nineteenth-century studies and radically reconceived it. He demonstrates that Victorian perceptions of the crowd broke decisively with earlier notions, inaugurating a tradition of interpreting popular demonstrations as symptomatic of much deeper meanings than they ostensibly expressed. He shows how important the deployment and interpretation of bodies became in the era's political imagination." --Catherine Gallagher, author of