Stories of Books and Libraries

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics anthology of stories that testify to the irresistible power of the written word

The characters in the delightful stories collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories. In these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore’s “Community Life” and Elizabeth McCracken’s “Juliet” and are ushered into a host of unusual libraries, including the infinite rooms of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and a secret library in Helen Oyeyemi’s “Books and Roses.”

Books exert their power in mysterious ways: an attempt by the military leaders of an imaginary nation to censor all of literature goes awry in Italo Calvino’s “A General in the Library” and Julio Cortázar’s mesmerizing “The Continuity of Parks” dramatizes the merging of the world inside and outside of a book. In Stories of Books and Libraries, a dazzling array of writers including Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Walter Benjamin, Isaac Babel, Teffi, and Ray Bradbury pay tribute to books and the magical places that house them.