Offers advice to people on how to talk about books they have not read, including books they have skimmed, heard about, or read and forgotten, analyzes situations in which people might find themselves talking about books they have not read, and includes recommendations on how to resolve such social dilemmas.

"In Silences, Tillie Olsen ... confronts ... the crucial relationship between circumstances--class, color, sex, the times and climate into which one is born--and the creation of written literature. These essays ... explore the problems of literary 'silences' in the careers of both the acknowledged great and those who ceased to write ... Tillie Olsen focuses on the silences that are most immediate to her own experience: how a negative literary climate,...

On December 9, 1995, Toni Cade Bambara died at the age of fifty-six, a profound loss to American culture. In its obituary the New York Times called her "a major contributor to the emerging genre of black women's literature, along with the writers Toni Morrison and Alice Walker." The author of many acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, among them three pioneering and timeless volumes: Gorilla, My Love and The Seabirds Are Still Alive, both collections...

"In Social Poetics, Mark Nowak imagines a new theory for poetry in the 21st century. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Nowak's new book traces a "people's history of the poetry workshop" and chronicles the past twenty years of his own activism in organizations he founded-the Union of Radical Workers & Writers (URWW) and the Worker Writers School. Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities...

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister: a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. But had she been allowed to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immoral sibling. In this classic essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment, using...

"In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne's College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted--literally--by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between...

The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children's publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not...