The Devil's Library bookcover

The Devil's Library

Add to Wishlist
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world

Description

The Devil's Library is a book of lies, a book about books that don't exist, a book about dark magic hidden in the written word. The imagined texts are sometimes ancient, sometimes apocryphal. There are devils and wraiths, killers and demonologists, prophets and philosophers. The Devil's Library is a collection of fables and myths: imaginary, fabulous, and sometimes murderous. This text is not a road-and once it's been opened, there's no turning back.

Product Details

PublisherJackleg Press
Publish DateSeptember 16, 2024
Pages234
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781956907117
Dimensions9.0 X 6.0 X 0.5 inches | 0.8 pounds

About the Author

Joachim Glage has been an academic and an attorney and many other things, but most notably a writer and a filmmaker. His stories, often taking imaginary and fabulous books as their theme, have appeared in literary periodicals and anthologies worldwide. THE DEVIL'S LIBRARY, a collection of his fiction, is his first novel. He resides in Colorado.

Reviews

Glage has given us an utterly captivating collage of essays that is, in the truest and best sense, sui generis. With its unerring instinct for unearthing intellectual gold in the inexhaustible, labyrinthine, and stubbornly persistent realm of printed matter, The Devil's Library stands in the lineage of Thomas Browne, Coleridge, Borges, and Sebald. Ranging from the abstruse to the fantastic, the complex paradoxes and insights here reclaimed from philosophical, theological, anthropological, or biographical miscellany and brought to life so vividly in these pages are not just being rescued from oblivion. Rather, in Glage's tonally varied and subtly propulsive telling, they are in a deeper sense redeemed. Few books better stage the absorbing delights of voracious, disinterested, and eclectic reading everything from treatises to telegrams, from Scriptural exegesis to newspaper clippings. Glage's responsiveness to the unexpected enriches us all.


-Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English & Professor of Systematic Theology, Duke University


Browse the stacks of The Devil's Library at your peril! You'll find obscure but fascinating treatises demonstrating that God cannot be perfect, labyrinthine heretical arguments against traditional morals, and reports of the mysterious deaths and murders of authors. A demonic alternative version of Genesis turns sacred history upside down. Who knew that the devil was not only a humorist but the author of frightening underground books? Discover them here.


-Gary Shapiro, author, Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics


Hoax meets homage in this glorious collection, an imaginary where bespoke apocrypha and wishful thinking invite us into a labyrinth of possibility, association, and a kind of readerly revisionist collaboration. Funny, subversive, and authoritatively anti-authoritarian, Glage finds no tradition unassailable or otherwise invulnerable to his joyful repurposing. What Stanley Crawford did for travel writing in Travel Notes, Glage does for storytelling and bibliophilia. Joachim Glage is not only a writers' writer but writing's writer. Borges is dancing in his grave.


-Andrew Tonkovich, editor, Santa Monica Review


Joachim Glage's fiendishly entertaining collection combines the pleasures of deciphering an ancient scroll, curling up with a good detective story, and stealing an accursed manuscript from a crypt. Erudite, inventive, and marvelously sly, The Devil's Library will delight readers of philosophical speculative fiction until it dissolves in a plume of evil-smelling smoke."


-Sofia Samatar, author, The White Mosque and A Stranger in Olondria

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.sign up to affiliate program link
Become an affiliate