Where I'm reading from : the changing world of books / Tim Parks.

I:$tThe world around the book.$tDo we need stories? --$tWhy finish books? --$tE-books are for grown-ups --$tDoes copyright matter? --$tThe dull new global novel --$tReading it wrong --$tWhy readers disagree --$tWhere i'm reading from --$gII:$tThe book in the world.$tWhat's wrong with the Nobel? --$tA game without rules --$tMost favored nations --$tWriting adrift in the world --$tArt that stays home --$tWriting without style --$tLiterature and bureaucracy --$tIn the chloroformed sanctuary --$tWriters into saints --$gIII:$tThe writer's world.$tThe writer's job --$tWriting to win --$tDoes money make us write better? --$tFear and courage --$tTo tell and not to tell --$tStupid questions --$tThe chattering mind --$tTrapped inside the novel --$tChanging our stories --$tWriting to death --$gIV:$tWriting across worlds.$t"Are you the Tim Parks who...?" --$tUgly Americans abroad --$tYour English is showing --$tLearning to speak American --$tIn praise of the language police --$tTranslating in the dark --$tListening for the jabberwock --$tIn the wilds of leopardi --$tEchoes from the gloom --$tMy novel, their culture.

"Why do we need fiction? Why do books need to be printed on paper, copyrighted, read to the finish? Why should a group of aging Swedish men determine what "world" literature is best? Do books change anything? Did they use to? Do we read to challenge our vision of the world or to confirm it? Has novel writing turned into a job like any other? In Where I'm Reading From, the internationally acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks ranges over a lifetime of critical reading--from Leopardi, Dickens and Chekhov, to Woolf, Lawrence and Bernhard, and on to contemporary work by Jonathan Franzen, Peter Stamm, and many others--to overturn many of our long-held assumptions about literature and its purpose. Taking the form of thirty-eight interlocking essays, Where I'm Reading From examines the rise of the "global" novel and the disappearance of literary styles that do not travel; the changing vocation of the writer today; the increasingly paradoxical effects of translation; the shifting expectations we bring to fiction; the growing stasis of literary criticism; and the problematic relationship between writers' lives and their work. In the end Parks wonders whether writers--and readers--can escape the twin pressures of the new global system and the novel that has become its emblematic genre. "--