Stories of books and libraries

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.