An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics anthology of stories that
testify to the irresistible power of the written word The characters in the delightful stories
collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name
of the Rose to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories. In
these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore’s
Community Life” and Elizabeth McCracken's Juliet and are ushered into a host of unusual
libraries including the infinite rooms of Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel” and a
secret library in Helen Oyeyemi’s Books and Roses.” Books exert their power in mysterious ways:
an attempt by the military leaders of an imaginary nation to censor all of literature goes awry
in Italo Calvino’s A General in the Library” and Julio Cortázar’s mesmerizing The Continuity of
Parks” dramatizes the merging of the world inside and outside of a book. In Stories of Books
and Libraries a dazzling array of writers including Evelyn Waugh Colette Walter Benjamin
Isaac Babel Teffi and Ray Bradbury pay tribute to books and the magical places that house
them. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards printing on acid-free
cream-colored paper with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping decorative endpapers
silk ribbon markers European-style half-round spines and a full-color illustrated jacket.
