Alison's Nonfiction

In Reading for Fun, Alison Lurie considers some of the most brilliant and original American and British writers of the last hundred years, including Henry James, Doris Lessing, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, Anthony Powell, Angela Carter, and Garrison Keillor—some of whom she has known personally. Their best works combine both tragedy and comedy, supernatural events and social realism—and they are all fun to read.

In this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie explores the theory that the best children's books authors have often preferred the world of young people to the world of adults. Lurie looks at children's classics from every era and relates them to the authors who wrote them, including Little Women author Louisa May Alcott and Wizard of Oz author Frank Baum, as well as Dr. Seuss and Salman Rushdie. In the Process she reveals how these gifted writers have used children's literature to transfigure sorrow, nostalgia, and the struggles of their own experiences.