A reader's book of days : auspicious births and untimely deaths, bad reviews and bestsellers, romances and betrayals, hoaxes and scanals, and other true tales from the lives and works of writers for every day of the year

**A witty and addictively readable day-by-day literary companion.** At once a love letter to literature and a charming guide to the books most worth reading, __A Reader's Book of Days__ features bite-size accounts of events in the lives of great authors for every day of the year. Here is Marcel Proust starting __In Search of Lost Time__ and Virginia Woolf scribbling in the margin of her own writing, "Is it nonsense, or is it brilliance?" Fictional events that take place within beloved books are also included: the birth of Harry Potter’s enemy Draco Malfoy, the blood-soaked prom in Stephen King’s __Carrie__. __A Reader's Book of Days__ is filled with memorable and surprising tales from the lives and works of Martin Amis, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Roberto Bolano, the Brontë sisters, Junot Díaz, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, Hilary Mantel, Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’Connor, Orhan Pamuk, George Plimpton, Marilynne Robinson, W. G. Sebald, Dr. Seuss, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, Hunter S. Thompson, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, and many more. The book also notes the days on which famous authors were born and died; it includes lists of recommended reading for every month of the year as well as snippets from book reviews as they appeared across literary history; and throughout there are wry illustrations by acclaimed artist Joanna Neborsky. Brimming with nearly 2,000 stories, __A Reader's Book of Days__ will have readers of every stripe reaching for their favorite books and discovering new ones. 100 illustrations Book connoisseur Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers' lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments and achievements. Each handsome page in A Reader's Book of Days is devoted to a day of the year, featuring original accounts of events in the lives of great writers, and fictional events that took place within beloved books