A feeling for books : the Book-of-the-Month Club, literary taste, and middle-class desire

Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading.

Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture.

Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life.

Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors.

Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird .

Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. |For anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.

Radway offers both an engaging look at the Book-of the-Month Club's role as a cultural institution and a profound meditation on the love of books.