The Great Age of Storytelling

The Glory Days of Adventurers and Rogues, Time Travelers, and Great Detectives

Michael Dirda

With infectious enthusiasm, "the best read person in America"—as Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda has been called—aims to rekindle our passion for classic works of adventure, mystery, fantasy and romance.

Kidnapped, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Kim, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Trent’s Last Case, Captain Blood, The Enchanted Castle, The Man Who Was Thursday—these are just a few of the many wonderful works reclaimed for 21st-century readers in Michael Dirda’s The Great Age of Storytelling. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1930 in England, The Great Age of Storytelling is both a celebration of some of the world’s best “comfort reading” and an introduction to many of the foundational masterpieces of modern genre literature.

Known for his engagingly conversational style, Dirda, a longtime book columnist for The Washington Post, also champions lesser-known works deserving renewed attention today. Readers will be introduced to the thrilling historical romances of Stanley J. Weyman, Richard Marsh's daringly transgressive and macabre chiller, The Beetle (which appeared the same year as Dracula and outsold it), Walter Besant's The Revolt of Man, which reverses the traditional roles of the sexes, and the comic novels of F. Anstey, Barry Pain, J. Storer Clouston and other precursors of P.G. Wodehouse (whose early work is also included).

And that's just a beginning. Who can forget those sinister yet beguiling rivals of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty such as Guy Boothby's suave Dr. Nikola, Sax Rohmer's insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Elizabeth Thomasina Meade and Robert Eustace's beautiful and ruthless Madame Koluchy, or Anthony Skene's world-weary Monsieur Zenith? There are appreciations, too, of E.R. Eddison's epic The Worm Ouroboros, E.A. Wyke-Smith's The Marvellous Land of Snergs (which influenced Tolkien's The Hobbit), Margaret Irwin's poignant time-slip romance, Still She Wished for Company, and, not least, such cautionary fables as Owen Gregory's Mecannia, the Super-State and Katharine Burdekin's prescient Swastika Night.

Capacious and absorbing, The Great Age of Storytelling can be enjoyed both for the pleasure of Dirda's bookish company and as a guide to a lost world of compulsively entertaining fiction. As admirers of Michael Dirda's earlier books know—these include Browsings, Classics for Pleasure and Bound to Please, among others—he has devoted his life to promoting reading, especially the reading of the great works of the past. The Great Age of Storytelling may be his magnum opus.

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and longtime book columnist for The Washington Post. He was once chosen byWashingtonian Magazine as one of the twenty-five smartest people in our nation’s capital (but, as Michael says, you have to consider the competition). He also writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement;the New York Review of Books and other literary journals. His previous publications include the memoir An Open Book, four collections of essays—Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and Classics for Pleasure—and On Conan Doyle, for which he won an Edgar Award. A lifelong Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle fan, he was inducted into The Baker Street Irregulars in 2002. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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Endorsements & Reviews

"A rambunctious personality wanders the aisles of rare-book stores; musing about language, aging and traffic; and catching up with fellow aficionados of the weird and the obscure. The innumerable forgotten books he catalogs are captivating.”
The New York Times

"Pleasure, provocation, passion ? just some of the words that came to my mind and through my heart as I perused this book. A reunion with the old forgotten favorite books and an introduction to some dazzling new ones, this is a book to go to bed with, to wake up to, and to browse through in between.” Azar Nafisi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Republic of Imagination

“In remembering and reflecting upon his own first excitements as a reader, Dirda is infectious.” Larry McMurtry, Harper's Magazine

"It’s awfully refreshing, in this Age of Noise, to know that there are still critics like Michael Dirda reading the pages of books old and new. His essays have a sort of plain-spoken elegance about them, one that relies more on a generosity of feeling than on an excess of intellect. Dirda shows that he’s one of the most accessible critics still doing the good work.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Smart but not stuffy, critical but not carping, self-engaged but not self-absorbed. Dirda’s intellect is a brightly populated curio cabinet.” The Wall Street Journal

"Michael Dirda, bookman extraordinaire, has elevated the indulgent pleasures of browsing to the quality of high art. A marvelous collection for serious book lovers, common readers and all of us who take a guilty delight in the gossip of literature." Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading

“Elegantly written musings about calligraphy, writer’s block, genre conferences, the books on a given critic’s nightstand, with the odd personal reminiscence thrown in.”
The Los Angeles Review of Books