It is one of the great near-misses in modern publishing history. In 1953 a forty-one-year-old schoolmaster named William Golding finished a short, strange novel about a group of English boys stranded on a tropical island…
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There is a particular category of rare book that transcends the ordinary parameters of the collecting field. These are not simply early printings of significant texts they are the physical embodiments of cultural turning points,…
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Some books exist in multiple registers simultaneously. There is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a text — the collection of quatrains composed in eleventh-century Persia by the mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám, rendered into…
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The Nobel Prize in Literature is the most consequential recognition in the literary world. Awarded annually by the Swedish Academy since 1901, it has conferred its authority on writers whose work has, in the Academy’s…
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When Little, Brown published Infinite Jest on February 1, 1996, it arrived already mythologized — a 1,079-page novel with nearly 400 endnotes, written by a thirty-three-year-old from central Illinois who had spent four years on…
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In 1831, Victor Hugo changed the course of literature—and architecture—with a single novel: Notre-Dame de Paris, better known to English readers as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. That year, the world first encountered two of literature’s…
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