The Book of Lost Books - Softcover

Kelly, Stuart

3.47

825 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141016744 ISBN 13: 9780141016740

Publisher: Penguin, 2006

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In an age when out-takes from Big Brother 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 book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history lesson, part expose, The Book of Lost Books is the first guide to literature's what-ifs and never weres.

Here Stuart Kelly reveals the tantalizingly absent works of the famous, the acclaimed and the influential. Was Shakespeare's Love's Labours Won a sequel to Love's Labours Lost - or just an alternative title for The Taming of the Shrew? And what was the monstrous secret contained in Lord Byron's Memoirs that caused his publisher to burn the manuscript...

Civilized and satirical, erudite yet accessible, The Book of Lost Books tells the fascinating true stories behind the books that can exist only in our imagination.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

‘An absolute joy . . . a work of great passion, insight and scholarship’ -- Joe Queenan, The New York Times Book Review

‘Clever and highly entertaining ... recall[s] John Aubrey's gossipy 'Brief Lives' and Lytton Strachey’s 'Eminent Victorians' . . . a many-splendored thing’ -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

About the Author:

Stuart Kelly is deputy literary editor of Scotland on Sunday. He has written for McSweeneys, Poetry Review and Nerve. He lives in Edinburgh.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.