A Feeling for Books

Deftly melding ethnography, cultural historical past, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection,
A Feeling for Books is without delay an attractive research of the Ebook-of-the-Month Membership’s influential function as a cultural establishment and a profoundly private meditation concerning the expertise of studying. Janice Radway traces the historical past of the well-known mail-order ebook membership from its controversial founding in 1926 by way of its evolution into an enterprise uniquely profitable in mixing commerce and tradition. Framing her historic narrative with writing of a extra private kind, Radway displays on the up to date function of the Ebook-of-the-Month Membership in American cultural historical past and in her personal life. Her detailed account of the requirements and practices employed by the membership’s in-house editors can also be an absorbing story of her interactions with these editors. Analyzing her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the membership’s picks and, later, as a professor of literature, she affords a collection of rigorously analytical but deeply private readings of such beloved novels as
Marjorie Morningstar and
To Kill a Mockingbird. Wealthy and rewarding, this ebook will captivate and delight anybody who’s within the historical past of books and within the private and transformative expertise of studying.