What is the role of the storyteller in 21st Century society? Do stories possess the power to change the world we live in? This book sets out to investigate the ways in which stories can lend an identity to a whole society. It explores how books can hold the secret to what binds us together.

What is the role of the storyteller in 21st Century society? Do stories possess the power to change the world we live in? This book investigates the ways in which stories can lend an identity to a whole society. From Gilgamesh to Bible, from Don Quixote to The Fast Runner , it explores how books can hold the secret to what binds us together.

Illuminating the mysteries of libraries, the author ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens and Jorge Luis Borges. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought - the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest.

An analysis of the creation and influence of The Iliad and The Odyssey that establishes how, these two poems have come to resonate throughout the world.

A volume of notes, impressions of travel, of friends, of public and private events - elicited by the author's reading.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are perhaps the some of the most influential works in the history of western literature. This book analyses their creation and influence and establishes how they have come to resonate throughout the world.

Presents a journey through the world of toys and the children's rooms that were their home, from the late 19th century. This book is suitable for children, toy specialists, and collectors.

This history of reading goes from the earliest examples of the clay tablets and cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to today's digital revolution. It argues that it is the demands of the reader, acting alongside the will of the writer, that is the evolutionary motor of literary genres.

Offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries. This title conducts a library tour that extends from the author's childhood bookshelves to the 'complete' libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google.

Ossyane, a young Lebanese man and his Jewish wife Clara return to live in Haifa after World War II. Just as war breaks out in the new-born state of Israel, Ossayne is forced to go to Beirut. The border with Israel closes behind him and he becomes separated from his wife with tragic consequences.

Erik Desmazieres is considered to be one of the finest French printmakers of his generation. This volume surveys the artist's earlier production from the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on Desmazieres imaginary places, through 80 prints and drawings. It also includes the artist's masterpiece The Temptation of St Anthony .

Throughout the ages, writers have created an astonishing diversity of imaginary places, worlds of enchantment, horror and delight. This guidebook takes the reader on a tour of more than 1200 imaginary cities, islands, countries, and contintents, from Homer to the late 1990s.

In the lush, uninhibited atmosphere of Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson is languishing with the disease that will soon kill him; when a chance encounter with the mysterious Scottish missionary, Mr Baker, turns his thoughts back to his conservative, post-Reformation Edinburgh home. As Stevenson's meetings with the tantalizingly nebulous missionary become increasingly strange, a series of crimes ...

This collection of essays addresses the nature of books and literature as a moral imperative and explores the consequences of society's betrayal of its readers and writers. Amongst the writers who feature in the book are Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, G.K. Chesterton, St Augustine and Goethe.

In these essays, Alberto Manguel discusses the nature of books and literature as a moral imperative and explores the consequences of society's betrayal of its readers and writers. He covers writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and G.K. Chesterton, as well as Che Guevara and Goethe.

Part memoir, part biography, and a celebration of the living quality of literature, the author's reflections on the works of Borges, and of the writers he admired, form a portrait of this enigmatic figure, and describe an important stage in the formation of a world-class reader.