How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. Art. Gloria Frym has written a love story about how we read and why we read, and the way books invade our psyches and change our lives. Within these pages are her encounters with Proust and Flaubert and Dickinson and Whitman, and they are for her what the great cities of the world are to life-long travelers, dream destinations, whole worlds. Her lucid and wide ranging thoughts make for necessary reading now more than ever, because books Frym proves here can save us still.--Tom BarbashHOW PROUST RUINED MY LIFE & OTHER ESSAYS by Gloria Frym--one of America's finest, most crucial poets and prose writers--is a treasure culled from a lifetime of reading widely, freely, carefully, with passion, intellect, and curiosity. Frym reads not for erudition or pedantry, but for the deep pleasure of entering another's created world. Her sphere of reading--which spans the work of San Francisco County Jail inmates to Proust, Emerson,