Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of "Fanny Hill," whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice. This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony--Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, "Ex Libris" establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

安妮·法迪曼（Anne Fadiman），生於美國紐約市，在康涅狄格州和洛杉磯長大，畢業於哈佛大學。畢業後，她在懷俄明州當野外探險嚮導，後來迴到紐約從事寫作。曾任《生活》雜誌的特約撰稿人，《文明》雜誌編輯和《美國學人》編輯。她的第一本書《鬼怪抓住你，你就跌倒瞭》（The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down，FSG，1997）獲“美國國傢書評奬”，她還寫有隨筆集《書趣》（Ex Libris），編有《經典重溫》（Rereadings，FSG，2005）等作品。她現與傢人住在馬薩諸塞州西部，並擔任耶魯大學弗朗西斯住校作傢。