Poetry. READING THE REMOVE OF LITERATURE is a reading of Maurice Blanchot's seminal book The Space of Literature, performed on the page as an annotative writing that encircles the should-be space of print. Through the progressive appropriation and then erasure of Blanchot's text, and through a processual transposition of hand-writing into formal typography, Thurston addresses the very question of the possibility of literature that obsessed Blanchot. The meaning of the candid reflections and meditations which form the incisive marginalia is founded in a tension with the suggestions of the absent text. Floating alone these annotations may have little worth or make little sense, but between these covers they do not deny the history of their derivation: They are constantly anchored by that which is missing, in a creative erring, in a process of over-coming, which in this book asserts an equality of presence between the read and the written; the reading and the writing.

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Through twenty works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction inspired by old library checkout cards, Please Do Not Remove anthologizes our rich literary culture through the voices of Vermont writers. Created, curated, and edited by writer Angela Palm, the book celebrates library ephemera and a love of literature. Inspired by libraries, librarians, or antiquated signatures and book titles on checkout cards, Vermont writers pen characters, prose, poems and plot lines in celebration of reading, books, and public libraries.

Two teenagers, strangers to each other, have decided to jump from the same bridge at the same time. But what results is far from straightforward in this absorbing, honest lifesaver from acclaimed author Bill Konigsberg. Aaron and Tillie don't know each other, but they are both feeling suicidal, and arrive at the George Washington Bridge at the same time, intending to jump. Aaron is a gay misfit struggling with depression and loneliness. Tillie isn't sure what her problem is -- only that she will never be good enough.On the bridge, there are four things that could happen:Aaron jumps and Tillie doesn't.Tillie jumps and Aaron doesn't.They both jump.Neither of them jumps.Or maybe all four things happen, in this astonishing and insightful novel from Bill Konigsberg.

The Last Stupid Book You’ll Ever Need to Read Don’t want to slog through lengthy old books like A Tale of Two Cities or The Giving Tree? Sick of being judged by your avid-reader “friends” who talk about books you’ve never heard of? Want to sound smarter without the strain of actually bettering yourself? Never fear. In How Not to Read, you’ll find techniques to fake your way through literature so you never have to read another book—ever! Inside, you’ll find: •Tips for getting through anything you have to read by reading faster: Just read every third word. (One Hundred Years of Solitude becomes “Many as the Colonel was, that when him ice.” Wow! It’s like a Gertrude Stein poem only more comprehensible!) •Entire genres summed up in a single page: Historical fiction becomes “Guess who else had sex: Hitler!” •Literary insults to make yourself seem smarter: “The only thing sadder than you is a Joycean epiphany!” “You’re as weak as a passive sentence written in negative form. And probably not considered by anyone to be worth more than an adverb.” It’s time to stop fearing those people who keep bringing up Ayn Rand. How Not to Read is here to liberate the world from ever needing to read a book again.