The Book of Lost Books : An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read (Hardcover)

from xenchu

This book should have been named "The Book of Lost, Unfinished and Never-written Books". The author lists not only books lost but also books unfinished and never-written as well as episodes of the writer's life (and psychology) to explain why what happened happened. I learned a little bit about a...

from JBD1

British book critic Stuart Kelly took a wonderfully good idea and has turned it into mush. Perhaps it was because my expectations for The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read were so high that I was so disappointed in this book. Kelly's aim is a good ...

from dono421846

Full marks for research, but at times I felt that his treatment of "lost" wobbled a bit. The core meaning, of course, is that completed manuscripts have gone missing, and vanished from history. But he also includes books never written or started but never finished, which opens the range of possib...

from mstrust

Beginning at the very beginning of the written word, the missing parchments or symbols that first told a story from one human to another, and finishing with missing works from Sylvia Plath and George Perec, this is a book of missing literature. Some of the works were actually completed, then stol...

from MiaCulpa

A great tour-de-force by Kelly as he spans millennia covering writers, famous and obscure, throughout history that have had their writing misplaced or destroyed for whatever reason. Homer, Aristophanes, Philip K. Dick and Jane Austen are all namechecked and I recommend keeping a dictionary handy ...