<![CDATA[The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read]]>

false <![CDATA[The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read]]>

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In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are saved, it’s sobering to realize that some of the world’s greatest prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty, wry, and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history lesson, part exposé, The Book of Lost Books is the first guide to literature’s what-ifs and never-weres. In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination: ·Aristophanes’ Heracles, the Stage Manager was one of the playwright’s several spoofs that disappeared. ·Love’s Labours Won may have been a sequel to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost–or was it just an alternative title for The Taming of the Shrew? ·Jane Austen’s incomplete novel Sanditon, was a critique of hypochondriacs and cures started when the author was fatally ill. ·Nikolai Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls after a religious conversion convinced him that literature was paganism. ·Some of the thousand pages of William Burroughs’s original Naked Lunch were stolen and sold on the street by Algerian street boys. ·Sylvia Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes, claimed that the 130 pages of her second novel, perhaps based on their marriage, were lost after her death. Whether destroyed (Socrates’ versions of Aesop’s Fables), misplaced (Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine was pinched from his publisher’s car), interrupted by the author’s death (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston), or simply never begun (Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, America, a second volume of his memoirs), these missing links create a history of literature for a parallel world. Civilized and satirical, erudite yet accessible, The Book of Lost Books is itself a find.

319884

2005

The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read

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4 0 false false Tue Aug 04 21:45:17 -0700 2009 Tue Aug 04 21:54:45 -0700 2009 more...]]> 0 0 false false Thu Feb 05 09:47:45 -0800 2009 Thu Feb 05 09:47:45 -0800 2009 Sure, it's "esoteric and demanding" (New York Times), but that quality seems to be The Book of Lost Books' charm. A regular literary critic for Scotland on Sunday, this is Stuart Kelly's first book, a work born from a lifelong fascination with the missing pieces of literary history. The br...

more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jul 02 19:47:19 -0700 2007 Mon Jul 02 20:06:52 -0700 2007 Misalnya "Kitab Mu...more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Jun 22 11:28:38 -0700 2007 Sat Dec 08 18:03:16 -0800 2007 more...]]> 2 0 false false Mon Jun 30 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 30 10:47:18 -0700 2008 Tue Jul 08 12:48:32 -0700 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Jul 21 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun May 31 22:35:41 -0700 2009 Wed Jul 22 08:21:52 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Wed Mar 19 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Mar 16 08:17:06 -0700 2008 Wed Mar 19 10:17:56 -0700 2008 more...]]> 2 0 false false Tue Feb 24 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Feb 24 08:46:27 -0800 2009 Tue Feb 24 08:49:54 -0800 2009 2 0 false false Fri Jan 09 10:37:22 -0800 2009 Tue Dec 30 14:17:26 -0800 2008 Fri Jan 09 10:37:22 -0800 2009
the author's long-winded, vague, tiresome style torpedoes (and SINKS) a first-class idea.

one of those books where you read a paragraph & go "what?"]]> 4 0 false false Tue Dec 02 12:49:51 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 02 12:50:42 -0800 2008 4 0 false false Thu Apr 02 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Mar 14 00:19:10 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 02 22:36:29 -0700 2009 2 0 false false Sun Sep 28 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Sep 12 13:31:43 -0700 2008 Mon Sep 29 07:35:17 -0700 2008 1 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Fri Oct 26 01:35:09 -0700 2007 Sun Dec 16 01:29:47 -0800 2007 more...]]> 2 0 false false Sun Sep 06 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Aug 21 16:47:27 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 07 06:23:04 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Mon May 19 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun May 04 10:53:55 -0700 2008 Sat Nov 29 02:26:53 -0800 2008 more...]]> 0 0 false false Sat Feb 09 16:38:38 -0800 2008 Fri Jul 06 10:09:20 -0700 2007 Fri Jul 06 10:11:59 -0700 2007 3 0 false false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Sep 07 18:27:51 -0700 2007 Fri Sep 28 08:16:20 -0700 2007
I'm a little miffed by his take on Swinburne and sometimes questioned his sources/historical take, but otherwise it's a fun read.]]> 2 0 false false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Sep 01 12:52:49 -0700 2008 Mon Sep 01 12:55:45 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Thu Jun 05 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed May 14 22:46:20 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 09 12:42:26 -0700 2008 3 0 false false Thu May 22 18:32:40 -0700 2008 Thu May 22 18:33:44 -0700 2008