Product Details

The Guardian (London) - Nicholas Lezard

Paperback not so much of the week as of the year, of the decade - or, I am inclined to say, of all time. And why? Because it's the best book ever written, that's why. I use the word "book" with care. It's not a novel, a tract, an epic poem, a history; it is, quite self-consciously, the book to end all books.... And not only that, but it's useful: it makes you less melancholy. So buy it now.

Booknews

This work is cited in Books for College Libraries, 3d ed.. It is one of the major documents of modern European civilization, a survey not only of melancholy in all its myriad forms, but also of humanity's endless efforts to assuage it. First published in 1621, the book was an immediate popular success. The New York Review Books edition was edited by Holbrook Jackson in 1932. This new edition contains a new introduction by William Gass, director of the International Writer's Center. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

What People Are Saying

One of the maddest and most perfectly paranoid, obsessively organized, etceterative assaults on the feeble human powers of concentration ever attempted.

What People Are Saying

All I can say is that most modern books weary me, but Burton never does... His writing is like talk, learned but earthy, and once he starts, he is hard to stop... That he was a humorist in our sense of the word we need no biographical facts to attest: The Anatomy of Melancholy is, by a magnificent and somehow very English irony, one of the great comic works of the world.

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Table of Contents