Nothing Remains the Same

Wendy Lesser is the author of His Other Half: Men Looking at Women through Art; Pictures at an Execution; A Director Calls (Faber and Faber, UK, 97), a biography of Stephen Daldry; and The Amateur, an intellectual biography exploring the intersection of art and experience (Pantheon, 99). A winner of the Pen/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in 1997, Lesser was also editor of Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography.

From the esteemed cultural critic and journalist Wendy Lesser, Nothing Remains the Same is a bibliophile's dream: a book about the pleasures and surprises of rereading, a witty, intelligent exploration of what books can mean to our lives. Compared with reading, the act of rereading is far more personal -- it involves the interaction of our past selves, our present selves, and literature. With candor, humor, and grace, Lesser takes us on a guided tour of her own return to books she once knew, from the plays of Shakespeare to twentieth-century novels by Kingsley Amis and Ian McEwan, from the childhood favorite I Capture the Castle to classic novels such as Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, from nonfiction by Henry Adams to poetry by Wordsworth. Lesser conveys an infectious love of reading and inspires us all to take another look at the books we've read to find the unexpected treasures they might offer.