Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-Read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission

In Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission, assembled by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding (editors of the Canadian literary magazine Brick), 74 writers honor books that hang in the world by a thread, if at all. Contributors include the editors; Margaret Atwood on Hjalmar S derberg's Doctor Glas, which caused a scandal in Sweden in 1905; Anne Carson on Dhuoda's Handbook for William, dating to the 840s, wherein an exiled wife imparts ""[t]actics of survival... in this world and the next"" to her hostage son (whom she never saw again); and Robert Creeley on David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible, ""an extraordinary record of... the last of the fifties."" ( Aug. 28)