Books Promiscuously Read

Reading as a Way of Life

Heather Cass White

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Hardback

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English

Farrar Straus Giroux
28 September 2021

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Literary studies: general; Literary companions

Heather Cass White's Books Promiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preeminence of literature as an aesthetic form, Books Promiscuously Read illustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading provides for those inclined to do it.

Through three sections-Play, Transgression, and Insight-which focus on three ways of thinking about reading, Books Promiscuously Read moves among and considers many poems, novels, stories, and works of nonfiction. The prose is shot through with quotations reflecting the way readers think through the words of others.

Books Promiscuously Read is a tribute to the whole lives readers live in their books, and aims to recommit people to those lives. As White writes, ""What matters is staying attuned to an ordinary, unflashy, mutely persistent miracle; that all the books to be read, and all the selves to be because we have read them, are still there, still waiting, still undiminished in their power. It is an astonishing joy.""

By: Heather Cass White
Imprint: Farrar Straus Giroux
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 144mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 299g
ISBN: 9780374115265
ISBN 10: 0374115265
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 28 September 2021
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Heather Cass White has edited three collections of Marianne Moore's work: New Collected Poems; A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936; and Adversity & Grace: Marianne Moore, 1936-1941. She is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.