It is the story of the Galactic Empire, crumbling after twelve thousand years of rule. And it is the particular story of psycho-historian Hari Seldon, the only man who can see the horrors the future has in store: a dark age of ignorance, barbarism and violence that will last for thirty thousand years. Gathering together a band of courageous men and women, Seldon leads them to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy where he hopes they can preserve human knowledge and wisdom against all who would destroy them. Asimov went on to add numerous sequels and prequels to the trilogy, building up what has become known as the Foundation series, but it is the original three books, first published in the Forties and Fifties, which remain the most powerful, imaginative and breathtaking.

"Amazing not only as literature but as biography."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times

One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel's reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s. Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.

Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.

"Marvelously subtle, tragic, and often comic."—James Wood, The New Republic

Homer's two epics of the ancient world, The Iliad and The Odyssey, tell stories as riveting today as when they were written between the eighth and ninth century B.C. This edition employs Samuel Butler's classic translations of both texts.  The Iliad, which tells of the siege of Troy by the Greeks, is an unforgettable tale of nations at war and of the courage and compassion heroic soldiers show upon the field of battle. The Odyssey is the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and the many marvels and challenges he encounters during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. 

This important work, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of Pound's aesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active, critical mind and become increasingly sensitive to the beauty and inspiration of the world's best literature. With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding "Treatise on Meter" provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. ABC of Reading displays Pound's great ability to open new avenues in literature for our time.

On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive HISTORY OF CROME. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, CROME YELLOW is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."

Widely praised for his recent translations of Boethius and Ariosto, David R. Slavitt returns to Ovid, once again bringing to the contemporary ear the spirited, idiomatic, audacious charms of this master poet.

The love described here is the anguished, ruinous kind, for which Ovid was among the first to find expression. In the "Amores," he testifies to the male experience, and in the companion "Heroides" through a series of dramatic monologues addressed to absent lovers he imagines how love goes for women. You think she is ardent with you? So was she ardent with him, cries Oenone to Paris. Sappho, revisiting the forest where she lay with Phaon, sighs, The place / without your presence is just another place. / You were what made it magic. The "Remedia Amoris" sees love as a sickness, and offers curative advice: The beginning is your best chance to resist; Try to avoid onions, / imported or domestic. And arugula is bad. / Whatever may incline your body to Venus / keep away from. The voices of men and women produce a volley of extravagant laments over love s inconstancy and confusions, as though elegance and vigor of expression might compensate for heartache.

Though these love poems come to us across millennia, Slavitt s translations, introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda, ensure that their sentiments have not faded with the passage of time. They delight us with their wit, even as we weep a little in recognition.

Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, "I honestly can't see why everybody who isn't a child, everybody who's theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn't spend all his time thinking about it. It's a pretty arresting thought." He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice's father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral.
Maurice's problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend's wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death.
The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.

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."

Hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies's acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. The Manticore--the second book in the series after Fifth Business--follows David Staunton, a man pleased with his success but haunted by his relationship with his larger-than-life father. As he seeks help through therapy, he encounters a wonderful cast of characters who help connect him to his past and the death of his father.

Hailed by the "Washington Post Book World" as ?a modern classic, ? Robertson Davies's acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. "World of Wonders"?the third book in the series after "The Manticore"?follows the story of Magnus Eisengrim?the most illustrious magician of his age?who is spirited away from his home by a member of a traveling sideshow, the Wanless World of Wonders. After honing his skills and becoming better known, Magnus unfurls his life's courageous and adventurous tale in this third and final volume of a spectacular, soaring work.
?Robertson Davies is one of the great modern novelists.?
?Malcolm Bradbury, "The Sunday Times" (London)
?Robertson Davies is a novelist whose books are thick and rich with humor, character and incident. They are plotted with skill and much flamboyance.? ?"The Observer" (London)

"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""

"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.

"A delightful compendium of Dirda's most memorable essays revels in seven years' worth of bibliophilic passion....For any book lover who...doesn't know what to read next, Dirda will provide a lovely and genial guide."—Kirkus Reviews

"Michael Dirda may be as close to the ideal as we are likely to get."—Annie Proulx

"Michael Dirda is a superb literary essayist, and Readings should provide deep delight for discerning readers."—Harold Bloom

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.

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"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.""

"As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again."
--"Chicago Tribune" (Editor's Choice) While books contain insights into our selves and the world, it takes a conversation--between the author and the reader, or between two readers--to bring them fully to life. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word informs and enriches nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.
Organized by significant life events and abounding with quotations from great writers and thinkers, "Book by Book" showcases Dirda's capacious love for and understanding of books. Favoring showing as much as telling, Dirda draws us deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an eye to how we might better understand our lives.

Much more than a word list, the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus is a browsable source of inspiration as well as an authoritative guide to selecting and using vocabulary. This essential guide for writers provides real-life example sentences and a careful selection of the most relevant synonyms, as well as new usage notes, hints for choosing between similar words, a Word Finder section organized by subject, and a comprehensive language guide. The text is also peppered with thought-provoking reflections on favorite (and not-so-favorite) words by noted contemporary writers, including Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Simon Winchester, many newly commissioned for this edition.
The third edition revises and updates this innovative reference, adding hundreds of new words, senses, and phrases to its more than 300,000 synonyms and 10,000 antonyms. New features in this edition include over 200 literary and humorous quotations highlighting notable usages of words, and a revised graphical word toolkit feature showing common word combinations based on evidence in the Oxford Corpus. There is also a new introduction by noted language commentator Ben Zimmer.

This acclaimed fantasy classic of men, elves, and gods is at once breathtakingly exciting and heartbreakingly tragic. Published the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring, Poul Anderson's novel The Broken Sword draws on similar Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon sources. In his greed for land and power, Orm the Strong slays the family of a Saxon witch--and for his sins, the Northman must pay with his newborn son. Stolen by elves and replaced by a changeling, Skafloc is raised to manhood unaware of his true heritage and treasured for his ability to handle the iron that the elven dare not touch. Meanwhile, the being who supplanted him as Orm's son grows up angry and embittered by the humanity he has been denied. A pawn in a witch's vengeance, the creature Valgard will never know love, and consumed by rage, he will commit a murderous act of unspeakable vileness. It is their destiny to finally meet on the field of battle--the man-elf and his dark twin, the monster--when the long-simmering war between elves and trolls finally erupts with a devastating fury. And only the mighty sword Tyrfing, broken by Thor and presented to Skafloc in infancy, can turn the tide in a terrible clashing of faerie folk that will ultimately determine the fate of the old gods. Along with such notables as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner Poul Anderson is considered one of the masters of speculative fiction. This edition contains the author's original text.

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.

"So remarkable in truth is this novel that I cannot understand why it is not universally known and admired." - Hugh Walpole
""I Am Jonathan Scrivener" remains a tantalizing, highly diverting philosophical novel of rare elegance and wit." - Michael Dirda
James Wrexham is thirty-nine, lonely, and stuck in a dead-end job when he comes upon an advertisement for a position as secretary to Mr. Jonathan Scrivener. Much to his surprise, he is hired at a lavish salary despite never even meeting Scrivener, and he is told to take up residence at once in the flat of his new employer, who has suddenly disappeared. Mystified by Scrivener's strange conduct and desperate to learn something about him, it seems Wrexham will get the answers he seeks when Scrivener's friends begin to visit the flat: Pauline Mandeville, an ethereal beauty, Francesca Bellamy, a widow who may responsible for the death of her husband, Andrew Middleton, a disillusioned alcoholic, and Antony Rivers, a handsome playboy. But as each of them unfolds his story about Scrivener, it seems that none of them are describing the same person, though all are obsessed with finding him. Why has he hired Wrexham, and why does he seem to have thrust this unlikely group of people together? Is Scrivener engaged in an inscrutable experiment, or could he be laying some kind of trap? And will this enigmatic figure ever appear and say, "I am Jonathan Scrivener"?
Popular in his time for his psychological thrillers, Claude Houghton (1889-1961) was admired by writers as diverse as P. G. Wodehouse, Henry Miller, Hugh Walpole, and Graham Greene, but has fallen into neglect in the past half-century. This new edition restores his masterpiece "I Am Jonathan Scrivener" (1930) to print and includes Walpole's introduction from the 1935 edition and an essay by Pulitzer Prize winning critic and Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda.