“Hartman successfully recasts some of our basic questions--and it is perhaps through our questions that we understand our human predicament. Recommended.” —Library Journal

“Hartman carefully shows how reading can lead us to our authentic selves.” —Publishers Weekly

“...a profound recognition of the weight and value that words can have. Hartman's intensely scrupulous manner of scrutinizing things is in itself a form of authenticity.” —Los Angeles Times

“In 13 personal essays, Hartman examines the interaction between life and art, focusing on concerns about the authentic.” —W.F. Williams, Choice

“This is a profound, learned, impassioned meditation on the role literary study can play in invigorating the imaginative life of our civilization--without which it is difficult to imagine having a civilization at all.” —Jonathan Rosen, author of The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“A certain kind of reading--end driven, moving toward the satisfaction of conclusion and resolution--is not the pleasure given by this text; and indeed were the text to give it, it would be in tension with its own mode of thinking, a mode of thinking we can weakly call dialectic, moving back and forth between the noting of appearance and fakery everywhere and the equally omnipresent desire for the real. In the experience it provides, this beautifully written book is truer to the lesson it would teach: the difficulty and necessity of the search for the authentic.” —Stanley Fish, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago