Shelf Life: Stories by the Book
10 best books like Shelf Life: Stories by the Book (Gary Paulsen): Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books, 13: Thirteen Stories That Capture the Agony and Ecstasy of Being Thirteen, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore, An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, Guys Write for Guys Read, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, Buried in Books: A Reader's Anthology
Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books
The captivating stories behind fifty of the greatest authors and their most famous literary creations
Before Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara?, there had never been a single volume that explored the backstories of so many of the greatest books in the English language. A work sure to captivate all...
| Author | James Howe |
| ISBN | 1416926844 |
"If thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number...you would think a civilized society could come up with a way for us to skip it."
-- from "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" by Bruce Coville
No one will want to skip any of the twelve short stories and one poem that make up this collection...
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
| Author | Maureen Corrigan |
| ISBN | 0375709037 |
“It’s not that I don’t like people,” writes Maureen Corrigan in her introduction to Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading. “It’s just that there always comes a moment when I’m in the company of others—even my nearest and dearest—when I’d rather be reading a book.” In this delightful...
Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love
| Author | Anne Fadiman |
| ISBN | 0374530548 |
Is a book the same book—or a reader the same reader—the second time around? The seventeen authors in this witty and poignant collection of essays all agree on the answer: Never.
The editor of Rereadings is Anne Fadiman, and readers of her bestselling book Ex Libris will find this volume...
Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore
| Author | Lawrence Goldstone |
| ISBN | 0312263953 |
More than a sequel, Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore is a companion piece for Used and Rare. A delight for the general reader and book collector alike, it details the Goldstones' further explorations into the curious world of book collecting. In Slightly Chipped, they get hooked on the correspondence...
An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books
Little did Wendy Werris imagine that when she began a temp job at a Hollywood bookstore in 1970 at age nineteen, she had embarked on a thirty-five year career that would stretch into a journey of self-discovery and literary enlightenment. In An Alphabetical Life, Werris reflects upon how she came to...
A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict
| Author | John Baxter |
| ISBN | 0312317263 |
In the rural Australia of the fifties where John Baxter grew up, reading books was disregarded with suspicion, owning and collecting them with utter incomprehension. Despite this, by the age of eleven Baxter had 'collected' his first book—The Poems of Rupert Brooke. He'd read the volume often,...
| Author | Jon Scieszka |
| ISBN | 0670060275 |
What is a typical guy moment, anyhow? Daniel Pinkwater remembers the disappointment of meeting his Lone Star Ranger hero up close and personal. Gordon Korman relishes the goofy ultra violence of the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Stephen King realizes that having your two hundred-pound babysitter fart...
| Author | Michael Dirda |
| ISBN | 0805083383 |
"As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again."
—Chicago Tribune (Editor's Choice)
While books contain insights into our selves and the world, it takes a conversation—between the author and the reader, or between two readers—to bring them fully to...
Buried in Books: A Reader's Anthology
| Author | Julie Rugg |
| ISBN | 0711229236 |
For bibliophiles, life is full of tricky problems: wondering whether a small trunk full of reading material can be taken on board as hand luggage; how to smuggle yet another guilty stash of tomes past the nearest and dearest. But as Julie Rugg shows in this anthology, bibliophiles are by no means new....
| Author | Jane Yolen |
| ISBN | 0152164448 |
Features the Nebula Award-winning novella "Lost Girls."
In these modern myths and tales for the young and the young at heart, Jane Yolen transforms the impossible into the familiar and real. Among the outlandish wonders are an Alice grown tough in Wonderland, a dear--but dead--mother's homecoming,...
| Author | Kathryn Lasky |
| ISBN | 0152012591 |
Harper Jessup is an avid reader, and when her parents become “migrants for God” she must keep her books secret. As Harper grows older and realizes how valuable reading is to her, she comes to understand that her parents’ radical efforts in favor of educational censorship are related to a quest...
| Author | Marc Aronson |
| ISBN | 0763645621 |
Pass! Shoot! Swish! An all-star team of YA authors scores spectacularly with an action-packed anthology about street basketball.
It’s one steamy July day at the West 4th Street Court in NYC, otherwise known as The Cage. Hotshot ESPN is wooing the scouts, Boo is struggling to guard the weird...
| Author | Donald R. Gallo |
| ISBN | 0763632910 |
"Stories by eleven well-known authors touch on a variety of teen experiences, with enough attitude and angst to speak to young adults anywhere." — SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
Fleeing from political violence in Venezuela, Amina and her family have settled in the United States. Sarah, adopted,...
| Author | Roxanne J. Coady |
| ISBN | 1592402100 |
With the goal of promoting literacy (and with proceeds going to the Read to Grow Foundation), here are 65 spirited testaments to the transformative power of reading from 65 distinguished contributors, as compiled by bookseller Roxanne Coady and editor Joy Johannessen.
Books change lives,...
| Author | Scott W. Hunt |
| ISBN | 0525468188 |
I can't believe it took me this long to read this book!! I loved it! Artist Scott Hunt provides 9 evocative charcoal drawings meant to inspire narration, and 18 authors for teens write short stories about them. There are two stories for each picture, proving that there is no "right" way to interpret a picture....
| Author | Shannon McKenna Schmidt |
| ISBN | 1426217803 |
Follow in the footsteps of much-loved authors, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Jane Austen, and many more. For vacationers who crave meaningful trips and unusual locales, cue National Geographic's Novel Destinations a guide for bibliophiles...
| Author | Cynthia Rylant |
| ISBN | 0689712634 |
“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” ― Anatole France
Sheesh - I am becoming such a maudlin old broad! I don't know . . . maybe it's just raging hormones, but nearly every story in this collection moved me to tears. Rylant presents twelve very short...
| Author | Steven Gilbar |
| ISBN | 1567920950 |
What do Emerson, Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino all have in common beyond the fact they were all great authors? They all wrote fascinating essays on the art of reading books. Steven Gilbar, a lawyer who is foremost a reader, selected and edited a delightful compilation of essays on books and reading for...
| Author | Judy Blume |
| ISBN | 0689842589 |
"What effect does [the climate of censorship] have on a writer?....It's chilling.
It's easy to become discouraged, to second-guess everything you write. There seemed to be no one to stand up to the censors....so I began to speak out about my experiences. And once I did, I found that I wasn't as alone...
| Author | Andrew Piper |
| ISBN | 0226669785 |
Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book and a connoisseur of print, but as a card-carrying member...
Friends: Stories About New Friends, Old Friends, And Unexpectedly True Friends
| Author | Ann M. Martin |
| ISBN | 0439729912 |
Stories of friendship from some of the most acclaimed and dynamic writers in children's books today, edited by Ann M. Martin and David Levithan, with all proceeds going to The Lisa Libraries.
The friend can be the girl next door . . . or a faithful dog . . . or a teacher . . . or just plain invisible....
So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
"Gabriel Zaid's defense of books is genuinely exhilarating. It is not pious, it is wise; and its wisdom is delivered with extraordinary lucidity and charm. This is how Montaigne would have written about the dizzy and increasingly dolorous age of the Internet. May So Many Books fall into so many...
