Michael Dirda

The author shares personal essays on diverse topics ranging from literary pets and cursive writing to book inscriptions and the pleasures of science fiction conventions.

In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world's most entertaining books.

A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the world as an apprentice to the Master Wizard. Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) is arguably the most widely admired American fantasy novel of the past fifty years. The book's elegant diction, geographical sweep, and mounting suspense are quite irresistible. Earthsea, composed of an archipelago of many islands, is a land of the imagination, like Oz, Faerie,...