Books like Literary wonderlands by Laura Miller

1818 novel by Mary Shelley about young scientist Victor Frankenstein who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox experiment.

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

Irene, a spy for the secretive Invisible Library, and her assistant Kai race through an alternate London to recover a stolen book that threatens the fabric of reality.

In Tehran, Azar Nafisi secretly hires seven female students each week to read banned Western classics, revealing the personal and political struggles of women under Iran’s revolutionary regime.

In 1959 a kindhearted widow opens the only bookshop in seaside town Hardborough, facing hostile shopkeepers, a local arts doyenne, and a haunted shop, while confronting the town’s reluctance to embrace books.

Alan Jacobs shows that reading is thriving in America and offers practical, playful advice to help readers enjoy books without judgment, covering literary fiction, poetry, nonfiction and digital reading.

Alberto Manguel’s essay collection explores the Platonic concept of the library, weaving together thoughts on history, culture, architecture, and the joy of reading.

A sweeping multigenerational novel tracing Jesse Vogel’s descent from a family tragedy to scientific success while confronting America’s social upheavals and a generational divide.

The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or supergenre of contemporary writing - feminist fabulation - which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the relationship between women writers and postmodern fiction in terms of outer space and canonical space, Feminist Fabulation is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world women. Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether. Barr offers very specific plans for new structures that will benefit women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and science fiction theory alike. Feminist fabulation calls for a new understanding which enables the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that the literature called "feminist SF" is an important site of postmodern feminist difference. Barr forces the reader to rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just its membership list - and in so doing provides a discourse of this century worthy of a prominent reading by all scholars, feminists, writers, and literary theorists and critics.

Chronicles the Los Angeles Public Library fire and its aftermath and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the actor long suspected of setting the fire, showcases the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives, and delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity.

After his mother dies, 12‑year‑old David escapes into the stories that once comforted him, only for myth and war to collide in a world where a Crooked Man and a faded king rule over wolves and hidden secrets.