Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

How the stories of Scheherazade invented fantasy.

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A Dreamer of Mars: Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter

How a failed salesman became a titan of planetary romance.

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"We Revel in a Crowd of Any Kind": Dickens the Journalist

The great novelist, in love with the life of the streets.

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Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler

A diplomat’s journals form a scintillating chronicle of the Belle Époque – and beyond.

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Beyond the Veil: The Fiction of Arthur Machen

It's Halloween -- time to revisit the stories of the one of the masters of the "weird tale."

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Arabian Sands

A classic epic of endurance is also a testament to the beauty and hardship of desert life.

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When the World Spoke French

A captivating history of an era in which the gaze of the world was fixed on Paris.

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Idle Reading

A wealth of recommendations for whiling away the summer days.

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Tono-Bungay

H.G. Wells's most insightful visions concerned money, ambition, and the human heart.

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The Vintage Thrillers of John Buchan

A celebration of the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps and other classic early modern thrillers.

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We, The Drowned

Carsten Jensen's international bestseller is a darkly magical voyage through a sea of stories.

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The Idle Pleasures of Jerome K. Jerome

Michael Dirda on the comic Victorian charms of the author of Three Men in a Boat.

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Winter's Tales

A host of haunting stories, made to savor by a December fireside.

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The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard

A not-to-be-missed collection of delightful tales of the Napoleonic Wars, penned by the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

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The Ghost Stories of Lafcadio Hearn

 The uniquely chilling tales of an almost forgotten master of spectral fiction.

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A Visit to Don Otavio

Bruce Chatwin called Sybille Bedford's classic of travel writing a "book of marvels," and Michael Dirda agrees.

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The Long Ships

The masterpiece of a 20th-century Swedish historical novelist who belongs in the company of Dumas, Sabatini, and Patrick O'Brian.

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James Lees-Milne

The life, times, and seductions of James Lees-Milne (1908-1997), England's greatest 20th-century diarist.

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The Letters of Pliny the Younger

The correspondence of an Roman administrator reveals the mind of the ancient world's consummate "insider." Read more...

A Reader on Reading

A collection of essays on a reading life from the author of A History of Reading and The Library at Night

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On the Shoulders of Giants

Robert K. Merton's classic work of comic scholarship is a uniquely witty, digressive entertainment for the mind.

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The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist

Arresting and magical tales from a little known master of German literature. Read more...

2009: A Year in the (Reading) Life

Michael Dirda on the books of the year that "continue to linger most vividly in my memory."

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The Poems of Thomas Hardy

The novelist's other life, as a sensitive recorder of "tears in things." Read more...

Ecstasies

The fascinating folklore of the witches' sabbath in medieval Europe. Read more...

Hindoo Holiday

The idiosyncratic memoir of a visit to India, by the celebrated author of My Dog Tulip. Read more...

The Pillow Book

A thousand years on, a noblewoman's gleanings from Japanese courtly life still shimmer with beauty. Read more...

An Iranian Classic

Michael Dirda ventures into the phantasmagoric world of Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl. Read more...

After the Barbarians: From Gibbon to Auden

How classical scholars have redefined and rediscovered the fascinations of "Late Antiquity." Read more...

Elective Affinities

Michael Dirda on Goethe's penetrating tale of four lovers at cross purposes. Read more...

About the Columnist
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World. He is the author of the memoir An Open Book and several collections of essays. His most recent book is Classics for Pleasure.

May 23: Girolamo Savonarola was hanged on this day in 1498 and then incinerated in the same piazza in which the citizens of Florence had earlier attended more than one "bonfire of the vanities." George Eliot's 1863 novel Romola,

Do you recall the tagline from the very first Superman movie? "You'll believe a man can fly!" Well, I'm tempted to craft such a hyperbolic assertion for China Miéville's…

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Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

When a job at a French ad agency landed in his lap, novelist Rosecrans Baldwin had the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream of living la vie Parisienne. And though cold réalité intruded -- in the form of financial struggles and the limits of his rudimentary Francais -- the result was a more mature take on the city of his fantasies, flaws included.

Why Cats Land on Their Feet

The feline acrobatics and other mysteries of everyday physics that Mark Levi explores in this charming book are just the beginning. A fun and enlightening workout for your gray matter.

Dead Men

Scott's doomed Antartic expedition and the haunting mysteries surrounding its failure lead to obsession in Richard Pierce's debut novel. As painter Birdie Bowers pursues her fascination with the explorer and his death, she risks both her body and her heart for answers.