The Spectator By Joseph Addison

The Spectator

Browsings

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" (The Paris Review) and "the best book critic in America" (The New York Observer). His latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on a life in literature. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics are equally diverse: literary pets, the lost art of cursive writing, book inscriptions, the pleasures of science fiction conventions, author photographs, novelists in old age, Oberlin College, a year in Marseille, writer's block, and much more. As admirers of his earlier books will expect, there are annotated lists galore—of perfect book titles, great adventure novels, favorite words, books about books, and beloved children's classics, as well as a revealing peek at the titles Michael keeps on his own nightstand.Funny and erudite, Browsings is a celebration of the reading life, a fan's notes, and the perfect gift for any booklover.

The Spectator

The Spectator was a daily publication of 1711-12, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England after they met at Charterhouse School. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) was an English essayist, poet and man of letters. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine. His first major work, a book about the lives of English poets, was published in 1694. In 1712, he wrote his most famous work of fiction, a play entitled Cato, a Tragedy, which was based on the last days of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis. Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) was an Irish writer and politician. His first published work, The Christian Hero (1701), attempted to point out the differences between perceived and actual masculinity. He afterwards became a dramatist, and his comedies, such as The Tender Husband (1703) were met with success.