From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In the opening of this marvelous collection of book reviews, Dirda declares that his book "intentionally resembles a cocktail party more than a work of criticism: it’s meant to be entertaining, sometimes provocative, above all a way to catch up with old friends and make new ones." The author himself serves as the perfect host: intelligent but humble, witty but substantial, instructive but never dogmatic. Dirda, who has worked as a writer and editor at the Washington Post Book World for more than 20 years, and who won a Pulitzer for his criticism in 1993, arranges his volume by topic so that readers interested in, say, the Renaissance, can turn to the section on "Old Masters" and find essays on both Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose and Peter Brown’s history The Rise of Western Christendom. Dirda is particularly deft at presenting well-known classics in a way that makes them seem fresh and inviting. Of Rabelais’s characters he writes, for example: "You wouldn’t want them for neighbors, but they’d be great on your side in a fight." And he’s tops at conveying the pleasure of reading itself. In fact, if there’s one problem with his collection, it’s that its essays are so tantalizing that they make you want to put down his book and run out to read a whole slew of new ones. But this, it’s clear, is exactly what Dirda wants. He’s included only the most praiseworthy reviews in this volume, with the hope that they will encourage readers "to look beyond the boundaries of the fashionable, established, or academic" and to become familiar with "terrific writers from around the world," such as Fernando Pessoa, Marcel Proust and Mikhail Bulgakov. Any serious reader will appreciate these gracious recommendations from one of the best literary journalists of our time.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Week by week, year after year, Dirda has shared his love for books and literary expertise in a column for the Washington Post Book World, earning a Pulitzer Prize for his supple, judicious, and enlivening criticism. Following his fine memoir, An Open Book (2003), he has assembled a terrific reader's resource, gathering together dozens of his superlative essays. Dirda has a rare knack for revealing the process through which he forms his opinions, an approach that sharpens his readers' reading skills, and his range is phenomenal, nearly approaching the grandness of Harold Bloom's. Here are considerations of new translations of Herodotus and Rabelais as well as reviews of the late greats Stanley Elkin and William Gaddis. Eschewing the usual suspects, he writes about Dawn Powell, Henry Green, Terry Pratchett, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Dirda has a conspicuously good time reviewing literary biographies, which afford the opportunity for him to weigh in on both the biographer and the subject, be it Blake, Pushkin, Colette, or Chester Himes. Engaging, personable, and cogent, Dirda is a true champion of the book. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Anthony Hecht
A breadth of sympathy, a learned enthusiasm, a fresh and sprightly judiciousness, that enlivens as it informs, unfailingly satisfying.
Guy Davenport
He has the wonderful ability to make us feel as intelligent as he is.
Book Description
A showcase of one hundred of the world's most astonishing books, Bound to Please is an extraordinary one-volume literary education. Among the most enjoyable of literary critics, Michael Dirda combines erudition with enthusiasm, a taste for the outré and the forgotten, and a playful, understated wit. Like George Orwell or Gore Vidal, Dirda delights in popular genres, such as the detective novel and the ghost story, without neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes-overlooked classics. This new work features scores of Dirda's most engaging essays, never previously collected in book form, all intended to introduce readers to wonderful writers, from the anecdotal Herodotus and James Boswell to the sensuous Colette and Steven Millhauser to such European masters as Joseph Roth, Flann O'Brien, and Penelope Fitzgerald. With his trademark enthusiasm, Dirda also explores The Arabian Nights, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, the crime novels of Chester Himes and K. C. Constantine, and the worlds of Tarzan, Cormac McCarthy, and Proust. Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.
About the Author
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Washington Post Book World, is the author of Readings and An Open Book. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Bound to Please FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Opening with an impassioned critique of modern reading habits, Michael Dirda presents many of the great, and idiosyncratic, writers he loves most." "Bound to Please starts with ancient classics - Herodotus, the Bible, The Arabian Nights - and ends with a concisely annotated list of groundbreaking science-fiction novels. In between Dirda writes about, well, everything: Renaissance intellectual history and Russian literary theory, P. G. Wodehouse and spaghetti westerns, the celebrated modern masters (Colette, Nabokov, Borges) and the somewhat neglected ones (Ronald Firbank, Djuna Barnes, Flann O'Brien, Henry Green). Who other than Michael Dirda has detailed the pleasures awaiting readers when they pick up - to choose just one letter of the alphabet - Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pushkin, Marcel Proust, Fernando Pessoa, Georges Perec, Thomas Pynchon, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, and Terry Pratchett?" Many of Dirda's pieces can serve as concise introductions to neglected giants of the past, whether eminences like Rabelais, Victor Hugo, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Machado de Assis, and William Morris or twentieth-century masters such as Joseph Roth, Isaac Babel, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Italo Svevo.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
A Pulitzer Prize-winning critic at the Washington Post Book World, Dirda here talks about authors he likes, ranging from Herodotus to Colette to Cormac McCarthy. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning reviewer, critic, and essayist (An Open Book, 2003, etc.) dares to deliver on his subtitle's outrageous claim. Perhaps it's the persistent feeling of shared joy in the discovery of moving and majestic literary moments that allows readers to be less picky with Dirda than he often is with the authors he dissects. For instance, introducing himself as a writer who eschews simile wherever possible, he goes on to say that reading Rabelais is "a lot like going to a Slovak or Ukrainian wedding in an Ohio steel town, where you pay a dollar to dance with the bride, eat way too much kielbasa and stuffed cabbage [and] drink yourself silly . . . fun, but a little goes a long way." Then, in stressing that it's not what you read but what you read first, the author (on Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose) pins readers to the wall with medieval monasticisms, demanding that they grasp "patristic exegesis" and both the "anagogical and eschatological levels" of meaning in biblical symbolism in a single paragraph. No surprise later when Dirda celebrates the "lip-smacking vocabulary" of Anthony Burgess on Christopher Marlowe. Verbosity aside, it's his ability to dive in and extract themes, patterns, and even sweeping contexts that grip-along with bushels of literary quotes and epigrams, all keepers, such as Jean Cocteau's "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo." In Western fiction, Dirda notes, "love is a destructive passion," and our romantic mythology celebrates adultery, perfectly justifying a reading adventure in great, reasonably seamy literature. In addition to the classics, Dirda nominates lots of little-known or underappreciated gems, e.g., theAmerican novelist Djuna Barnes, a handful of post-Revolutionary Russians, and Terry Pratchett, a bestselling author in pre-Rowling Britain but not here. The main text is followed by concise, useful recommendations in Renaissance works, science fiction, and other genres. Tough at times, but well worth it, with manifold rewards for any serious reader. Agents: Glen Hartley, Lynn Chu/Writers' Representatives
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