Should you finish every book you start?

How has your family influenced the way you read?

What is literary style?

How is the Nobel Prize like the World Cup?

Why do you hate the book your friend likes?

Is writing really just like any other job?

What happens to your brain when you read a good book?

As a novelist, translator and critic, Tim Parks is well-placed to investigate any questions we have about books and reading. In this collection of lively and provocative pieces he talks about what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light.

These pieces were originally published as columns in the New York Review of Books.

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written eleven novels including Europa, Destiny, Cleaver and, most recently, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, as well as three non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy (most recently A Season with Verona), a collection of 'narrative' essays, Adultery and Other Diversions, and a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money. His many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso and Machiavelli. He lectures on literary translation in Milan and has published a book, Translating Style, which analyses Italian translations of the English modernists, plus two collections of essays Hell and Back and The Fighter that range from Dante to Leopardi, Borges to Rushdie, Garibaldi to Mussolini.