Reading Shakespeare Reading Me

". . . [T]his book should be in all libraries collecting on Shakespeare.-- ""Choice Reviews"" Mr. Barkan takes delight in. . . the four major plays to which he devotes his attention, each of which, he writes, ""feels as though it belongs to me."" Belongs to him because it helped to shape him. Mr. Barkan makes those plays belong to his readers as well. That's what the best kind of reading, criticism or aesthetic absorption should do.-- ""Wall Street Journal"" ""Astonishing. . . . Hilarious. . . . The mixture of analysis and memoir works because the author participates fully in the action of reading or viewing, and because he finds parallels between his life and those of Shakespeare's characters without looking for literal equivalences. He examines straight on and obliquely. At the end, even seasoned Shakespeareans will know more about Shakespeare than they did at the start. . . . And everyone will wish they could have studied with the man they have come to know through his writing.""-- ""The Wall Street Journal"" Barkan's luminous prose, his prodigious humor, and his generous readings of the plays and sonnets are a real joy. This brings tons of fun to the Bard's oeuvre.-- ""Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"" . . . [T]hose looking for a gay man's account of coming of age (and aging) while pondering some of the most resonant moments in Shakespeare--as presented by a leading Renaissance scholar--will find much to love in Reading Shakespeare Reading Me.-- ""Gay and Lesbian Review"" Reading Shakespeare Reading Me by Leonard Barkan (Apr. 5, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8232-9919-5) recounts the many ways that Shakespeare's works have influenced the author's life, and how the plays have taught him about beauty, truth, death, and the power of performance.---Publishers Weekly, Spring Announcements ""Reading Shakespeare Reading Me is a celebration of the act of reading; the way in which through literature one travels out of the self, into the other and discovers one's own identity. It is literature, in this case Shakespeare, that reveals us to ourselves. Barkan brilliantly unpacks his love of Shakespeare through the narrative of his own life, illuminating how Shakespeare's psychodramas offer a path to understanding the unanswerable questions of one's own youth, ultimately realizing that the narrative of family life is but a fiction written and rewritten many times along the way."" ---A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven: A Novel ""Leonard Barkan writes as one hopes a great teacher would teach--without cant, with modesty, and with genuine excitement about something that is worthy of our attention and maybe even our love."" ---William Germano, author of On Revision ""This is a brave and ambitious book: smart, learned, funny, and insightful. Barkan has mastered a conversational style that belongs partly to the classroom, partly to the space of theaters and museums, and partly to a kind of urbane humor that belongs to his generation of New Yorkers. Barkan has achieved something real and new here, and I am confident that an abundance of readers will find new ways into Shakespeare and into life writing through the gift of this book."" ---Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare ""This is the kind of book on Shakespeare that you can write when you are in your seventies and securely tenured. Barkan is relaxed, genial, confessional, but also dead serious, and willing to admit--indeed, this is the book's subject--that we read Shakespeare to find out how to live, and why we go on living.""---Joan Acocella, staff writer, The New Yorker Enthusiastic readers know what it feels like to have an author speaking directly to oneself, as if a text was written specifically for them. Reading Shakespeare Reading Me is a bibliomemoir and personal intellectual bildungsgroman in which Leonard Barkan explores a number of Shakespeare's plays through the lens of his own personal history and academic preoccupations, and vice versa... [H]e is an exquisitely sensitive reader both of them and his own biography.-- ""Critical Inquiry"" ""Can we read Shakespeare without reading ourselves? Can we as critics write or teach Shakespeare without sensing that Shakespeare had pre-written versions of our own lives or that our intellectual and emotional itinerary wasn't already traced in the plays and sonnets? We didn't see this, we never do, which is why we need to 'Barkanize' our Shakespeare, because Shakespeare always matters. The humanity, candor, humility of this book is disarming and reminds us that nothing exalts us more than to hear our most personal difficulties echoed by the great Bard himself."" ---André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name ""Leonard Barkan's Reading Shakespeare Reading Me is a triumphant vindication of critical self-absorption. This remarkable, exuberantly written book proves what many would scarcely think possible: that details unique to one individual (and a highly unusual one at that) can lead to fresh insights into some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, and at the same time that a sustained reflection on plays written four hundred years ago can lead to intimate and absorbing self-revelations."" ---Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare"