WHERE BOOKS FALL OPEN
A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion

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Edited by Bascove

David R. Godine

Copyright © 2001 Bascove. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-56792-186-8

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Lovers of Reading    Italo Calvino  If On a Winter's Night a Traveler.................3    Lynne Sharon Schwartz  Ruined by Reading.........................5    Roy Blount, Jr.  Summertime and the Reading Is Heavy.............6    Raymond Carver  Reading Something in the Restaurant.............12    Mary Stewart Hammond  Listening to the Radio....................14    Karen Chambers  Reading Goals...................................15    Charles Simic  The Pleasures of Reading.........................17    Elizabeth Barrett Browning  The Library in the Garret...........18    Virginia Woolf  The Back Bedroom................................19    Umberto Eco  How to Organize a Public Library...................21    Dorothy Parker  Ethereal Mildness...............................24    Robertson Davies  Books Are for Reading.........................28    Anne Fadiman  Never Do That to a Book...........................30The White Page    Muriel Rukeyser  Poem White Page White Page Poem................37    Billy Collins  Purity...........................................38    Wislawa Szymborska  The Joy of Writing..........................40    Anna Akhmatova  The Poet........................................42    Jane Kenyon  Afternoon in the House.............................43    Rainer Maria Rilke  The Notebooks of Maulte Laurids Brigge......44    Qin Zihao  Seeds of Poetry......................................46    Langston Hughes  English B......................................47    Calvin Trillin  Opportunities in Poetry.........................49    Pablo Neruda  Word..............................................50    Jerome Charyn  Word Music.......................................51    T. Coraghessan Boyle  This Monkey, My Back......................53    Edna St. Vincent Millay  If I Die Solvent.......................55    Xi Murong  Poetry's Value.......................................56    Mary Gordon  My Curtains: Snowbound from Having a Baby,    Finishing a Book................................................57    Jane Hirshfield  The Poet.......................................59    Joyce Carol Oates  An Old Prayer................................60    Margaret Atwood  Psalm to Snake.................................61    Steve Martin  A Word from the Words from Pure Drivel............62    Richard Wilbur  The Writer......................................65    Fran Lebowitz  Writing: A Life Sentence.........................67    Calvin Trillin  Sign Writing....................................72Some Thin Line of Comfort    Alberto Manguel  from A History of Reading......................77    Frances E. W. Harper  Learning to Read..........................80    Naomi Shihab Nye  Because of Libraries We Can Say These    Things..........................................................82    Audre Lorde  Story Books on a Kitchen Table.....................84    Anne Caston  The Book...........................................85    Miguel de Cervantes  from Don Quijote...........................87    Maxine Kumin  On Reading an Old Baedeker in Schloss    Leopoldskron....................................................89    Katha Pollitt  Lives of the Nineteenth-Century Poetesses........91    Kate Rushin  Reading Lists......................................92    Geoffrey O'Brien  Prisoners.....................................93    Vikram Seth  The Poet...........................................95    Czeslaw Milosz  And Yet the Books...............................96Where Books Fall Open    James Seay  Where Books Fall Open...............................99    Elizabeth Hardwick  On Reading.................................101    Virginia Woolf  from The Common Reader.........................102    Marianne Moore  Poetry.........................................104    Rachel Hadas  Teaching Emily Dickinson.........................105    Robert Pinsky  Library Scene...................................106    Derek Walcott  Love in the Valley..............................108    Jane Austen  from Northanger Abbey.............................110    Carol Weston  Becoming a Reader................................111    Rita Dove  Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967...................113    Marcel Proust  from Swarm's Way................................115    Randall Jarrell  Children Selecting Books in a Library.........116    Vickie Karp  Watching the Commuters Read.......................118    Colette Inez  Reading Tu Fu, I Wait for My Husband.............121    William Stafford  The Trouble with Reading.....................123    Adrian Spratt  The Vicarious Activity..........................124    Xi Chuan  Books................................................126    David Lehman  April 2..........................................128    Josephine Jacobson  Gentle Reader..............................129    Donald Hall  This Poem.........................................130    Geoffrey O'Brien  A Little Treatise on Ways of Reading.........134    Billy Collins  Reading Myself to Sleep.........................137    Jorge Luis Borges  Ars Poetica.................................139    Mark Strand  The Night, The Porch..............................141Acknowledgments....................................................143The Paintings......................................................144Credits............................................................145

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Excerpted from WHERE BOOKS FALL OPEN by . Copyright © 2001 by Bascove. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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