Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment — to systematically read her way through a random shelf of books in the library, LEQ-LES, "fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels." An original take on literary taste and habits by the acclaimed author of Parallel Lives.Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature." Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it.What results is a spirited experiment in "Off-Road or Extreme Reading." Rose's shelf of roughly thirty books has everything she could wish for—a remarkable variety of authors and a range of literary ambitions and styles. The early-nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of...

'I believe that marriage, whether we see it as a psychological relationship or a political one, has determined the story of all our lives more than we have generally acknowledged.'In every relationship there are two narratives; more often than not these narratives do not converge. This is the basis for academic and writer Phyllis Rose's cult classic Parallel Lives, a book that examines five literary Victorian partnerships, from Charles Dickens' disastrous marriage to Catherine Hogarth to George Eliot's joyful and unwed union with George Henry Lewes.In an age where divorce was scandalous and 'until death do us part' was taken literally, the subjects of Rose's book were forced to find inventive and surprising ways to co-exist. As she tracks the shifting tides of power within these parallel lives in fascinating detail, Rose shows how desire, fantasy and control play out in our most intimate relationships.Parallel Lives is an engrossing...