Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

Ex Libris

Confessions of a Common Reader

Anne Fadiman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

opens in a new window
opens in a new window Ex Libris Download image

ISBN10: 0374527229
ISBN13: 9780374527228

Trade Paperback

176 Pages

$15.00

CA$20.50

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

Anne Fadiman is—by her own admission—the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her nineteen pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in her apartment that she had not read at least twice.

Ex Libris recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's twenty-two-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who considered herself truly married only when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marry Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of flyleaf inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proofreading, the allure of long words, and the satisfaction of reading aloud. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

Reviews

Praise for Ex Libris

"A terrifically entertaining collection of personal essays about books . . . Heartening, tender, wise, and hilarious."—Patsy Baudoin, The Boston Book Review

"In the literary Eden that forms Anne Fadiman's life, the air remains pure allusion, the marginalia flows, and the only snake in the grass is a typo."—Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review

"Each essay is a model of clarity and lightly worn erudition, and speaks volumes about the author's appreciation for people as well as books."—The New Yorker

"A smart little book that one can welcome into the family and allow to start growing old."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"A lovely collection of essays on a family's love affair with books and words, a passion passed from her parents to her children."—Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman is the author of The Wine Lover's Daughter, a memoir about her father (FSG, 2017). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (FSG, 1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. Fadiman has also written the essay collections, At Large and At Small and Ex Libris, and is the editor of Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (all published by FSG). She is the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.

Gabriel Amadeus Cooney

Restoring Vanished Worlds: Anne Fadiman and Cullen Murphy, An Epistolary Conversation

Opening Up a Life: Anne Fadiman and Jenny Allen In Conversation

Anne Fadiman at Yale