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Every exile is offset by a return, or at least the possibility of a return. N.A. Fabris's return to his home town brings him face to face with a reality that owes its existence to both recent history and his memory of disappeared friends, altered landscapes, secret nightmares and a woman he once loved.
An eclectic history of human curiosity, a great feast of ideas, and a memoir of a reading life from an internationally celebrated reader and thinker Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question "Why?" has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different contexts throughout the chapters of human history. Why does evil exist? What is beauty? How does language inform us? What defines our identity? What is our responsibility to the world? In Alberto Manguel's most personal book to date, the author tracks his own life of curiosity through the reading tha...
Inspired by the process of creating a library for his 15th-century home near the Loire, in France, Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries in this captivating meditation on their meaning and significance.
In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.” Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to ...
A best-selling author and world-renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France’s Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000†‘volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading. In this poignant and personal reevaluation of his life as a reader, the author illuminates the highly ...
A book for book lovers by a true lover of books! At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel brilliantly covers reading as seduction, as rebellion, and as obsession and goes on to trace the quirky and fascinating history of the reader’s progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to digital.
"In Buenos Aires, 1964, a blind writer approaches a sixteen-year-old bookstore clerk asking if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud." "The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the world's finest literary minds; the boy was Alberto Manguel, who was later to become an internationally acclaimed author and bibliophile." "The young Manguel spent several years reading aloud and transcribing for the enigmatic Borges. Here he recalls this time with integrity and warmth, offering us an intimate and moving portrait of one of the great literary luminaries."--BOOK JACKET.
From clay tablets to CD-ROM, from book thieves to book burners, bibliophiles, book fools and saints, noted essayist Alberto Manguel follows the quirky and passionate 4,000-year-old history of the written work whose true hero is the reader. Photos & line drawings.
In this gorgeously imagined novel, a journalist interviews those who knew—or thought they knew—Alejandro Bevilacqua, a brilliant, infuriatingly elusive South American writer and author of the masterpiece, In Praise of Lying. But the accounts of those in his circle of friends, lovers, and enemies become increasingly contradictory, murky, and suspect. Is everyone lying, or just telling their own subjective version of the truth? As the literary investigation unfolds and a chorus of Bevilacqua’s peers piece together the fractured reality of his life, thirty years after his death, only the reader holds the power of final judgment. In All Men Are Liars, Alberto Manguel pays homage to literature’s inventions and explores whether we can ever truly know someone, and the question of how, by whom, and for what, we ourselves will be remembered.
"Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photographed, painted, built, sculpted - Alberto Manguel explores, with delight and erudition, how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent. Whether delving into the love of life in the twentieth-century world of Joan Mitchell, or the brutal complexities of Picasso's treatment of his mistress, revisiting the riddles of the past in the fifteenth-century painting of Robert Campin, or the heartrending life of 'the hairy girl' whose matted fur so astonished sixteenth-century Italy, laying bare the unequivocal passion of Tina Modotti or the passionate dream world of Marianna Gartner, and the colliding, unbalancing power of the architect Peter Eisenman - he helps us to enjoy and explore the visual landscape we live in."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved