A new book by America's leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why is Bloom's manifesto for the preponderance of written culture. In the vastly influential The Western Canon, Harold Bloom outlined what we should read to understand a greater depth of the individual self. How to Read and Why continues the argument and focusses on how we use literature in order to gain deeper self-awareness. Poems, stories, novels, plays and parables are all analysed as forms of writing as immersion, the language of individuality and inwardness: Shakespeare's sonnets, the short stories of Hemingway and de Cervantes, the novels of Proust and Calvino, Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and Mark's Gospel. Harold Bloom also addresses the idea of why we read: increased individuality, respite from visual bombardment, a return to 'deep feeling' and 'deep thinking'. How to Read and Why is an essential book for any reader, an introduction to the world of written culture, an inspirational self-help book for students and teachers alike.

哈羅德·布魯姆（1930— ），當代美國著名文學教授、“耶魯學派”批評傢、文學理論傢。曾執教於耶魯大學、紐約大學和哈佛大學等知名高校。主要研究領域包括詩歌批評、理論批評和宗教批評三大方麵，代錶作有《影響的焦慮》（1973）、《誤讀之圖》（1975）、《西方正典》（1994）、《莎士比亞：人的發明》（1998）等，以其獨特的理論建構和批評實踐被譽為“西方傳統中最有天賦、最有原創性和最有煽動性的一位文學批評傢”。