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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
My Reading Life
Pat Conroy · 331 pages
Bestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life.
Bad Feminist
Roxane Gay · 360 pages
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once l
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr · 256 pages
Karr breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, opening our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminating the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.
Why I Write
George Orwell · 124 pages
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Flannery O'Connor · 237 pages
The essays and articles in this volume are concerned mainly with the art of fiction--its quality, in regional writing; its nature and its aims; and its relatino to the writer's religion.
Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King
Stephen King · 214 pages
In this revealing and varied collection of interviews, Stephen King talks about his life, family, films and in particular about his macabre novels of the unknown that have made him so well known.
More Baths, Less Talking
Nick Hornby · 135 pages
Shares selections from the author's column in "The Believer" that discuss books he has bought and books he has read, and offers suggestions for great reads in every genre.
MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction
Chad Harbach · 312 pages
"Chad Harbach and contributors map out the 'two cultures' of American fiction: MFA programs and NYC publishing. In a widely read essay titled 'MFA vs. NYC,' bestselling novelist Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) argued that the American literary scene has split into two cultures: New York publishing versus university MFA programs. This book brings together established writers, MFA professors and
The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Elif Batuman · 297 pages
Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own.
The Rights of the Reader
Daniel Pennac · 208 pages
Classics for Pleasure
Michael Dirda · 346 pages
In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world's most entertaining books.
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
Michael Chabon · 222 pages
A series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton · 203 pages
The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why this is so. How Proust Can Change Your Life takes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the basis for a sustained investigation into the power and signif
Bartleby & Co.
Enrique Vila-Matas · 192 pages
Tells the story of a hunchback who is a failed writer that has no luck with women. He is a self-described "Bartleby", named after the Herman Melville character; someone who, when asked to reveal information about themselves, will respond that they "would prefer not to."
The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Azar Nafisi · 338 pages
The best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran presents an impassioned tribute to the importance of fiction to democracy that blends memoir with close readings of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. "A passionate hymn to the power of fiction to change people's lives, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Ten years a
The Hatred of Poetry
Ben Lerner · 96 pages
"No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my pu
Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading
Lizzie Skurnick, Laura Lippman, Meg Cabot, Jennifer Weiner, Cecily von Ziegesan
Remember that book you read at that time in your life when everything seemed to be going crazy—the one book that brought the world into focus and helped soothe your raging teenage angst?
Mapping the World of Harry Potter: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Explore the Bestselling Series of All Time
Leah Wilson · 240 pages
My Life in Middlemarch
Rebecca Mead · 293 pages
"A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch-- and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories."--From publisher description. "Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the gr
How To Be a Heroine
Samantha Ellis · 272 pages
A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen
Susannah Carson · 320 pages
For so many of us a Jane Austen novel is much more than the epitome of a great read. It is a delight and a solace, a challenge and a reward, and perhaps even an obsession. For two centuries Austen has enthralled readers. Few other authors can claim as many fans or as much devotion. So why are we so fascinated with her novels? What is it about her prose the has made Jane Austen so universally belov
What Makes This Book So Great
Jo Walton · 446 pages
"As any reader of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading--about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have con
Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
Susan Hill · 236 pages
Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade i