Michael Dirda

The author shares personal essays on diverse topics ranging from literary pets and cursive writing to book inscriptions and the pleasures of science fiction conventions.

"Winner of the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, Best Critical/Biographical Category, Mystery Writers of America" "Finalist for the 2012 Marfield Prize, The National Award for Arts Writing, Arts Club of Washington" "One of The Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Joyce Carol Oates" Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and longtime book columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of four collections of essays,...

Pulitzer Prize winner, Michael Dirda, shares his love for all literature, novels, comic books, poetry, even erotica, in this humorous memoir of his childhood. Growing up in a blue-collar, Midwestern household of the 50s and 60s, Dirda appalled his father with his insatiable thirst for reading. His humorous remembrances of the works he loved will spark the interest of anyone who savors a good story.

"Homer's two epics of the ancient world, The Iliad & The Odyssey , tell stories as riveting today as when they were written between the eighth and ninth century B.C. The Iliad , which tells of the siege of Troy by the Greeks, is an unforgettable tale of nations at war and of the courage and compassion heroic soldiers show upon the field of battle. The Odyssey is the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and the many marvels and challenges he encounters...

"Fifth Business Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous...