Product Description: An exuberant, expansive cataloging of the intimate physical relationship between a reader and a bookA way to leave a trace of us, who we were or wanted to be, what we read and could imagine, what we did and what we left for you. Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions...read more

Product Description: The Risk of Reading is a defense of the idea that deep and close readings of literature can help us to understand ourselves and the world around us. It explores some of the meaning and implications of modern life through the deep reading of significant books...read more

Product Description: Most scholars agree that reading a play is absolutely unlike live performance, but everything else about their relationship beyond this premise has proven contestable. Focusing on the editorial and textual history of Shakespeare, this book navigates these debates by exploring how textual distortions enrich a play's performance potentialities...read more

Product Description: How do readers experience literary narrative? Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind, this book offers a principled account of the dynamics underlying readers responses to narrative. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this study combines close readings of literary texts and theoretical discussion in ways that shed light on the deep connection between narrative, literary fiction, and human experience...read more

Demonstrates how to make everyday reading more rewarding by helping readers understand the symbols, themes, narrative devices and forms, and contexts of literary works.

Product Description: The Best Young Adult Books Contest presents a program that involves the whole classroom in an effort to plan, develop, and perform a mock "academy awards" show. The reader is guided through each and every step of the process, beginning with students reading and nominating books in eight categories and ending with a full-fledged production...read more

Product Description: Adult literacy teachers are constantly searching for effective, engaging and distinctly 'adult' ways to develop adult emergent reading and, for at least the past two hundred years, adults have formed themselves into reading circles to read and discuss novels on a weekly or monthly basis...read more

Product Description: The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious...read more

Product Description: "How often do you begin reading a book that makes you—immediately, urgently, desperately—want to read more books?” (Booklist). Nick Hornby has managed to write just such a book in this hilarious, insightful, and infectious volume...read more

Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book and a connoisseur of print, but as a card-carrying member of the first digital generation—and the father of two digital natives—he understands that we live in electronic times. Book Was There is Piper’s surprising and always entertaining essay on reading in an e-reader world. Much ink has been spilled lamenting or championing the decline of printed books, but Piper shows that the rich history of reading itself offers unexpected clues to what lies in store for books, print or digital. From medieval manuscript books to today’s playable media and interactive urban fictions, Piper explores the manifold ways that physical media have shaped how we read, while also observing his own children as they face the struggles and triumphs of learning to read. In doing so, he uncovers the intimate connections we develop with our reading materials—how we hold them, look at them, share them, play with them, and even where we read them—and shows how reading is interwoven with our experiences in life. Piper reveals that reading’s many identities, past and present, on page and on screen, are the key to helping us understand the kind of reading we care about and how new technologies will—and will not—change old habits. Contending that our experience of reading belies naive generalizations about the future of books, Book Was There is an elegantly argued and thoroughly up-to-date tribute to the endurance of books in our ever-evolving digital world.

Product Description: A groundbreaking vision on the future of reading, from an early innovator on Amazon's Kindle team. Is digital the death knell for print? Or will it reinvigorate the written word? What will happen to bookstores, book browsing, libraries, even autographs? Will they die out―or evolve into something new? In Burning the Page, digital pioneer Jason Merkoski charts the ebook revolution's striking impact on the ways in which we create, discover, and share ideas...read more