Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and longtime book columnist for The Washington Post. He was once chosen by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 25 smartest people in our nation’s capital (but, as Michael says, you have to consider the competition). He also writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books and other literary journals.

His previous publications include the memoir AN OPEN BOOK, four collections of essays --- READINGS, BOUND TO PLEASE, BOOK BY BOOK and CLASSICS FOR PLEASURE --- and ON CONAN DOYLE, for which he won an Edgar Award.

A lifelong Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle fan, he was inducted into The Baker Street Irregulars in 2002. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Books by Michael Dirda

Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books

by Michael Dirda - Essays, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

Michael Dirda's latest volume collects 50 of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on literary journalism, book collecting, and the writers he loves. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics are equally diverse: literary pets, the lost art of cursive writing, novelists in old age, Oberlin College, a year in Marseille, writer's block and much more, not to overlook a few rants about Washington life and American culture.