
84, Charing Cross Road
1970 · 112 pages
Twenty years of letters between a broke New York writer hunting English classics and the London bookseller who found them. She mailed meat parcels through rationing and never crossed the ocean in time.
★ 4.7

Twenty years of letters between a broke New York writer hunting English classics and the London bookseller who found them. She mailed meat parcels through rationing and never crossed the ocean in time.

Thirty-five years in a Prague cellar, Haňťa crushes wastepaper and saves the banned books he is paid to destroy, wrapping each bale in an art print with a rescued volume inside.

Borges wrote criticism the way he wrote fiction, in short pieces with trapdoors, on subjects from Dante to King Kong. Every writer creates his own precursors, he argues, and literary history rearranges itself.