Walk into Michael Dirda's home in suburban Maryland, and a palpable passion for books animates almost every room. In the living room the poetry of Auden, Dickey, and Stevens vies for space with multiple editions of Nabokov's Lolita. In the bedroom, volumes of ghost stories and the supernatural bump up against row after row of books by his favorite literary critics, Cyril Connolly and Edmund Wilson. Another room upstairs holds shelves of intellectual history, while in the basement stacks of Eudora Welty tilt against leaning towers of Henry James. Clearly, Dirda's lifetime has been devoted to reading. After 25 years as a writer and editor at the Washington Post Book World, this Pulitzer Prize-winning critic has mastered the skill of remaining receptive to all kinds of books. His columns and reviews carry a deeply personal tone and his readers may easily sense that he cares ardently about each work of literature he writes about.
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