{"product_id":"a-feeling-for-books-the-bookof-93896684","title":"A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire","description":"Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.","brand":"The University of North Carolina Press","offers":[{"title":"Standard Order","offer_id":46316513263852,"sku":"8854593896684-P","price":286.38,"currency_code":"AED","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0655\/2797\/2076\/files\/9780807848302_optimized.jpg?v=1756122992","url":"https:\/\/astoura.com\/products\/a-feeling-for-books-the-bookof-93896684","provider":"Astoura","version":"1.0","type":"link"}