Garrett Stewart is arguably the finest close reader of English texts on the planet. This new book of essays
offers a cornucopia of delights on a wide range of literary and cultural topics. Its release is an occasion for celebration – and for devouring its contents as soon as possible.

N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and author of Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts

It is never enough for Garrett Stewart merely to write, down or out, the results of his reading, whether of
literature, film, or art. His impulse is rather to strain ever closer to the objects of his close readings, to attain a propinquity intimate enough to enter into composition with them. The results, in what Stewart calls the 'textual prismatics' arrayed here, are uniquely collusive alloys of reading and writing, which magically protract, dilate, and reinflame the works that they treat.

Steven Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English Emeritus, University of Cambridge, UK

To read Garrett Stewart's expansive readings is to enter an expanding world: texts, images, and forms come more alive than they were before we read his account of them. His attention to novels, films, art objects, and criticism enlarges our very senses and makes us see how active reading can be.

Frances Ferguson, Mabel Greene Myers Distinguished Service Professor of English, University of Chicago, USA

This book offers a welcome opportunity to retrace and to connect some of Garrett Stewart's brilliantly eccentric footsteps. These essays –on Dickens, Hopkins, and Conrad, on Le Carré, Cavell, and conceptual art – are technically eccentric because, as they maintain an elliptic or parabolic orbit around criticism's shifting centers of gravity (New Historicism, postcolonial theory, surface reading, etc.), they use the official history of literary scholarship as a spur to Stewart's unofficial, beautifully errant, and always exciting thought.

Kent Puckett, Professor and Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in English, University of California, Berkeley, USA