"The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish -- allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues...

"Booksellers and librarians are superheroes, saving lives every single day. Here are their amazing, inspiring true stories as told to the greatest storyteller of our time, James Patterson. To be a bookseller or librarian... You have to play detective. Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. An advocate. A visionary. A person who creates 'book joy' by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, 'You've got to read this. You're going...

"The best stories are the ones we didn't know needed to be told The small, rundown village of Great Diddling is full of stories--author Berit Gardner can feel it. The way the villagers avoid outsiders, the furtive stares and whispers in the presence of newcomers... Berit can sense the edge of a story waiting to be unraveled, and she's just the person to do it. In fact, with a book deadline looming over her and no manuscript (not even the idea for...

Celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers the author admires above all others, from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan. In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose's previous essays, reviews,...

After the death of her sister, Nina Sankovitch kept her mind busy by dashing from one activity to another. Then on her forty-sixth birthday, she started reading a book a day and discovered the joy, healing, and wisdom.

"A retired bestselling author hosts a one-of-a-kind competition, with high risks and high rewards-giving the winner a chance to change lives. Lucy Hart has come a long way since feeling the cold neglect of her parents, whose attention always centered around her chronically ill sister's needs. Now a twenty-six-year-old teacher's aide, Lucy is able to share her love of books with bright, young students, and one in particular, a seven-year-old orphan...

The boy has lived his whole life trapped within a book-choked chamber older than empires and larger than cities. The girl has spent hers in a tiny settlement out on the Dust, where nightmares stalk and no one goes. The world has never even noticed them. That's about to change. Their stories spiral around each other, across worlds and time. This is a tale of truth and lies and hearts, and the blurring of one into another. A journey on which knowledge...

"For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life. In this delightful celebration of reading, Schwalbe invites us along on his quest for books that speak to the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions.'"--

Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions. All books have histories, and libraries are not just collections of books and databases but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers.